Category: Bunny Yeager

Yeager was a photographer and pin-up model. She graduated from Miami Edison High School and afterwards enrolled at the Coronet Modeling School and Agency. She won numerous local beauty pageants including in rapid succession Queen of Miami, Florida Orchid Queen, Miss Trailercoach of Dade County, Miss Army & Air Force, Miss Personality of Miami Beach, Queen of the Sports Carnival and Cheesecake Queen of 1951. Yeager became one of the most photographed models in Miami. Photos of Yeager appeared in over 300 newspapers and magazines. Yeager also designed and sewed many of the outfits she and her models wore, at one time boasting that she never wore the same outfit twice while modeling. Bruno Banani, the German fashion company, has developed a line of swimwear based on Yeager’s designs from the 1950s. Yeager entered photography to save money by copying her modeling photographs, enrolling in a night class at a vocational school in 1953. Her career as a professional photographer began when a picture of Maria Stinger, taken for her first school assignment, was sold to Eye magazine for the cover of the March 1954 issue. Yeager was one of the first photographers to photograph her models outdoors with natural light. She met Bettie Page in 1954, and took most of the photographs of her that year.
During their brief collaboration she took over 1,000 pictures of Page. Yeager played a role in helping to make Page famous, particularly with her photos in Playboy magazine. Yeager was a very prolific and successful pinup photographer in the 1950s and 1960s, so much so, that her work was described as ubiquitous in that era.