Bunny Yeager's Darkroom Pin-up Photography's Golden Era

Bunny Yaeger's Darkroom is a retrospective of this pin-up photographer's career both in front of and behind the camera. Bunny moved to Miami with her family in the late 1940s at age 17 and became one of the most photographed pin-up models of the period, winning the Queen of Miami beauty pageant. She ended up enrolling in photography school and becoming the only woman photographer of the time documenting the bathing beauties of Miami's booming beach culture. After great success selling her pin-up photos to various magazines, she photographed Bettie Page in 1955 (dressed in a Santa outfit Bunny made herself) and instantly sold it to Playboy magazine. It was the beginning of a long collaboration between her and Bettie, and the first of her many shoots for Playboy (she posed in the magazine's pages herself as well). She went on to publish several how-to books instructing women how to photograph themselves with charming yet practical tips on how to pose, use props, etc. This volume features excerpts and spreads from her previous how-to books, such as her 1964 How I Photograph Myself, as well as Bunny's self-portraits in which, while instructing on the fundamentals of photography and self-portraiture, she dramatically transforms herself, foreshadowing artists like Cindy Sherman and Nikki S Lee. The book includes dozens of Bettie Page images, the iconic as well as the never seen, and many other scantily clad beauties in various imaginative settings and poses. It even explores Bunny's claims to have invented the bikini (with photos to prove it).