When Bunny Yeager was photographing Bettie Page and other Playboy models for the magazine in the 1950s and 1960s, she wasn’t necessarily trying to make art. She was simply trying to make ends meet.

This is the lens through which we meet Yeager—a Miami-based multihyphenate who approached pin-up photography with a singular eye—in the 2025 documentary about her work, Naked Ambition. A model, photographer, filmmaker, and primary breadwinner for her family, Yeager was the force behind the centerfold that launched Page from fetish model to mainstream bombshell. She did it all—from casting her models to designing their costumes and choreographing their poses—at a time when women were expected to be homemakers and purity culture ran rampant.

“Bunny didn’t think of her work as groundbreaking—it was almost like she was too busy doing the work to think about the context around it,” said Kareem Tabsch, who co-directed Naked Ambition with Dennis Scholl. Through dozens of interviews with Yeager’s family, friends, and those she’s influenced, an ethos of practicality emerged. According to Tabsch, Yeager’s mindset was simple: “This is what makes a gorgeous image, and these gorgeous images are what sell, and I want to sell a lot of them.”

Naked Ambition focuses primarily on Yeager’s professional life, which began when she entered modeling competitions and beauty pageants in Miami, Florida, as a young woman. (Yeager was born Linnea Eleanor Yeager in 1929; her family moved from Pennsylvania to Miami when she was a teen.) And as she renamed and reinvented herself from a shy teenager into a beauty queen, she learned how to pose and how to translate that skill behind the camera, too.

That initial interest was only the beginning of a decades-long career that navigated changing art forms, evolving attitudes toward sex, and plenty of personal strife. A pioneer of self-portraiture, she would often appear in her imagery as her own model, sometimes using a mirror or a shutter release cable to serve as both a tool and a prop. Her work served as a primary influence for Playboy’s Miss January, Carlotta Kohl, who made history as the first Playmate to photograph herself for the magazine.

Yeager’s impact doesn’t stop there. One of her books, “How I Photograph Myself,” was first published in 1965, but it could handily serve as a guide to the selfies of today. Add the three films she produced and directed, the photos of a white-bikini-clad Ursula Andress she took for the James Bond film Dr. No, and a later career as a nightclub singer and actress, and it isn’t a stretch to think of Yeager as an early content creator.

“She would drift from thing to thing depending on what was put in front of her,” noted Scholl, who first earned Bunny’s “yes” for the documentary in 2014. “Her granddaughter makes a joke [in the documentary] about Bunny putting out a diet book, and the granddaughter says, ‘Bunny doesn’t have any dietary credentials.’ But somebody said, everybody looks at you, you’re beautiful. Let’s do a diet book. She goes, Great.”

That up-for-anything attitude afforded Bunny, her first husband Bud Irwin, and their two daughters, a comfortable life in Miami Beach. An all-time favorite Playboy photographer, she worked primarily with girl-next-door models who were as playful as they were sexy, and as coy as they were beautiful. 

“There’s this era, this moment when she was doing Playboy in particular, where she changed what pin-up looked like,” Scholl said. “There were regular models who did [pin-up] all the time, and she didn’t want that. She wanted a very different, fresh look. She really had a moment of setting the tone for the culture.”

In addition to interviewing Yeager’s two daughters and granddaughter—who each have wildly disparate views of and relationships with her legacy and body of work—Tabsch and Scholl sat down with Larry King; burlesque icon Dita Von Teese; photographer Bruce Weber; longtime Playboy executive ​​Dick Rosenzweig; and director and screenwriter Guinevere Turner, who wrote the script for the 2005 film The Notorious Bettie Page. The film also explores the mountains of prints and physical media that Yeager—once dubbed the “Queen of the Playboy Centerfolds”—left behind when she died in 2014.

Yet as much as Yeager helped redefine female sensuality for a post-war America, the culture also outpaced her in many ways. Naked Ambition takes a broader look at how American society at large changed—across war, political movements, and the aesthetics of sexuality. As much as Yeager changed pin-up, so did Deep Throat and the increasing availability of porn. Suddenly, her photos weren’t as in demand, an evolution that proved both financially and artistically devastating to Yeager, who was in the mid-1970s arrested and charged with promoting obscene material after being solicited to photograph an explicit photoshoot; the case was ultimately dismissed.

“She tried,” Tabsch stressed. “She’d taken some pictures of a couple having sex, and that ultimately led to her obscenity bust. I think she wanted to try to keep up with the changing times but that had a detrimental effect on her family life and her personal life, and probably cemented the feeling that she had that this wasn’t something she wanted to do.”

Still, Yeager’s legacy endures, from driving Kohl’s pictorial to the museums and galleries increasingly showcasing her photographs in exhibits. When the 1990s and 2000s saw a revival for Page and her rockabilly looks, Yeager cashed in with an eBay shop.

To the end, Naked Ambition’s filmmakers note, Yeager was a self-made woman who could transform a setback into a reincarnation like no other. “Bunny had a difficult life, and she was only starting to get her due at the end,” Scholl said. But even when he first knocked on her door to make a documentary about her in 2012, Scholl remembered that she first turned him down so she could focus on her own work.

“I go to Bunny, and I say, ‘Hey, I want to make a film about you,’” he said. “She goes, ‘Absolutely not. I’m much too busy with the books I’m making and the shoots I’m doing.’ She was 83 at the time, and she was still grinding away like crazy.”