Naked Ambition (Scholl and Tabsch, 2023
Naked Ambition is an affable documentary that is brimming with interesting tidbits and vignettes about the life and work of model turned photographer Bunny Yeager. What keeps it in the good-but-not-great category, for me, was a lack of a central thesis to tie together the various elements.
The film serves as a biography of Yeager. It attempts to demonstrate her talent as a photographer and argue that she has made significant contributions to that art form through her extensive catalog of pin-up, centerfold, and boudoir photos. It explores the seeming ironies of a female photographer contributing to a male-driven consumer category. It asks whether her experience as a model made her a better photographer and whether her gender made it easier for her to solicit pin-up models and elicit great work from them. It asks her family members whether that work was a legacy to be proud of or ashamed of. It attempts to explain the evolution of pornography through the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and whether each iteration was exploitative or empowering. There are celebrity and professional testimonials from Larry King, Bruce Weber, and Dita Von Teese.
That’s . . . quite a lot of ideas floating around one movie. I was engaged by almost all of the segments, but I also was frustrated that many were not developed beyond the articulation of the main point. This reservation is especially true about the formal description and evaluation of Yeager’s work. It is presented as a given that Yeager’s photography is exceptional, yet the qualities that make it so are glossed over. Photography, like film, is primarily a visual medium, so we get a lot more showing than telling. The documentary does a little better when it explores the relationship between Yeager as a photographer and her models, particularly Bettie Page. But even here the insights are not exactly profound. Yeager’s experience as a model made her sympathetic to difficult poses and allowed her to empathize with and talk to the women she was photographing. Her reputation and gender alleviated fears that the photography was a pretext for sexual interest in the subject.
The question of whether such photographs are inherently exploitative, whatever their formal qualities, could have used more development, particularly in reference to earlier works that pre-dated more cultural permissiveness. One commentator says that the distinctive of Yeager’s photographs, especially those involving Bettie Page, is a feeling of joyfulness and enthusiasm. Hugh Hefner opines that such an attitude towards nudity and sexuality was unthinkable in the 50s and 60s, which is what made Yeager’s work so exceptional. Whether that enthusiasm was posed or authentic is rather an important question, and it is one that film assumes an answer to without much examination.
Quibbles aside, the documentary is worth a look. It might be particularly helpful for those looking for an introduction to its topics without having to wade through a lot of hardcore examples.
Naked Ambition will have a limited theatrical release in the United States beginning September 12, 2025.
