Beyond Bettie Page: The Women Bunny Yeager Photographed and History Forgot

Jun 30
7 min read

When the Bunny Yeager archive was acquired by the University of Miami Special Collections, the researcher cataloguing it noticed something odd. Every folder in the collection was labelled with a model's name. Every folder except one. That exception was a manila envelope containing the only photograph in the archive of a Black woman. Yeager had written on it, in her own hand, a label using a racist euphemism of the era. No name. Just a category.

It's a jarring detail in the archive of a woman whose career is now celebrated as groundbreaking. But it also points toward something the Yeager story doesn't always reckon with: of the hundreds of women she photographed over five decades, almost none of them are remembered. Their faces are on prints selling at auction for hundreds of dollars. Their names, when they survive at all, exist mainly as caption lines. Bettie Page became an icon. The rest of them mostly just became photographs.

The Name in the Caption

Search for Dinnie Sutton online and you'll find a handful of vintage photography blogs, a few Artsy listings for gelatin silver prints offered by the Etherton Gallery, and an eBay listing for an archival pigment print from the original Bunny Yeager negative. The prints date to around 1960 and 1968. Sutton is also sometimes credited as Danny Sutton, suggesting she used both names at different points, possibly a stage name alongside a legal one, possibly the reverse. Beyond that, nothing.

She was photographed by Bunny Yeager at least twice across roughly eight years, which puts her among the more persistent figures in Yeager's orbit. The photographs were good enough to be kept and archived, good enough for the estate to continue selling prints from the original negatives decades later. But there's no record of which magazines, if any, her images appeared in. No interview, no biography, no trace of where she went after the 1960s. She exists in the historical record only as a subject, preserved by a photographer whose own name we know very well.

This is not unusual. The University of Miami archive, which holds over a hundred original Yeager images alongside her full publishing correspondence, reveals a woman who was meticulous about labelling her work. Models were named. Notebooks were sorted. Folders were organised by decade and theme: "Bikini Girls 1960s," a box tagged "Camping trip, Bettie Page and two models." Yeager kept records. But keeping a name in a folder and preserving a life are not the same thing, and the industry she worked in had little interest in the second.

Maria Stinger: The First One

Maria Stinger holds a specific place in Yeager's story. She was the first. In 1953, fellow glamour photographer Bill Hamilton introduced Stinger to Yeager, then still a student in a night photography class who'd barely touched a professional camera. The assignment Yeager produced from that first session, a portrait of Stinger, sold to Eye magazine and appeared on the cover of the March 1954 issue. It launched Yeager's career as a photographer. The two women became close friends.

Stinger was born in Philadelphia in 1931, the daughter of an Anglo-Irish police officer, and moved to Miami in 1948. She bore a strong resemblance to Marilyn Monroe, enough that in October 1954 the Miami Herald sponsored a contest that crowned her Miami's Marilyn Monroe. She went on to enter the Miss Florida pageant around the same time. The comparison was not only physical. Like Monroe, Stinger spent most of her adult life quietly unravelling. She worked for men's magazines throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, appearing in Caper, Gala, Glance, and Rogue among others. She appeared in several low-budget nudie films. She married, had three daughters, and divorced in 1965 after years of financial difficulty and deteriorating mental health.

Stinger attempted suicide by overdose in 1964. She survived that attempt, moved to South Carolina, and tried again in November 1967. She was thirty-six. Yeager, who described her as one of her closest friends, rarely spoke publicly about Stinger's death. The documentary Naked Ambition, which covered Yeager's career in some depth, barely mentioned it. The researcher who later wrote about the University of Miami archive noted it as one of the darker omissions in an otherwise comprehensive collection.

Stinger's granddaughter Christie Strong, a documentary editor, spent years trying to make a film about her grandmother's life. Around 2013, she said in an interview: "I always knew that I was going to tell Maria's story, even when I was younger. It was just a matter of how and when." Bunny Yeager, still alive at the time, was supportive of the project. Strong's description of Yeager's reaction was telling: she hoped to give the granddaughter a chance to step into Maria's shoes by photographing her. Even in grief, Yeager's instinct was to go back to the camera.

Lisa Winters: The Accidental Discovery

If Maria Stinger was the beginning, Lisa Winters was the breakthrough that no one planned. Yeager spotted Winters on a Miami street in the mid-1950s, a teenager running to catch a bus near her college. Yeager photographed her on the spot. She was born in Pompano Beach, Florida on March 6, 1937, and was barely nineteen when Yeager's photograph of her ran as the December 1956 Playboy centrefold.

Winters was so camera-shy that she refused to work with any male photographer. Every image Playboy published of her was taken by Yeager. In 1957, she was named the magazine's first-ever Playmate of the Year, an honour that had never been given before. It was a significant moment for Playboy and, consequently, for Yeager. When Winters later agreed to appear in two short films, her condition was that Yeager operate the camera. Outside of that, she left almost no record. What she did after the late 1950s is not documented in any source that has survived.

The accidental discovery was very much Yeager's style. She described herself as always being on the lookout for what she called "regular girls around Miami." She wasn't running a modelling agency or trawling casting calls. She was just paying attention. The researcher at the University of Miami archive described walking into Yeager's collection already knowing, from a chance conversation with his own mother, that Yeager had photographed her in a bikini in the 1960s. "Apparently," he wrote, "Yeager was into 'finding regular girls around Miami.'" His mother had never mentioned it until the subject came up. That's how most of these women sat in the record: as a quiet story that only came out when someone else asked the right question.

What the Archive Shows

Yeager shot over eighty women in the 1960s alone. Her book Bunny Yeager's Pin-Up Girls of the 1960s contains more than 230 images of eighty models, shot on beaches, in studios, with animals, in natural settings across Florida and beyond. Most of those eighty women have no Wikipedia entry, no IMDB page, no archive. The glamour photographers website that documented Yeager's career in some detail was able to name a handful: Diane Webber, Ginger Meadows, Christine Starr, Babe Collins, Linda Vargas, Joyce Nizzari, Carrie Price, Jackie Miller. For most of them, that's the extent of the record.

Yeager was meticulous, but she was also operating inside an industry with no interest in the long-term welfare or documentation of its models. The men's magazines of the 1950s and 1960s assigned names, sometimes real ones, sometimes professional ones, to the women in their pages. They didn't commission biographies. They didn't track what happened next. And when the magazine culture of that era ended, as it did sharply for Yeager in the 1970s when explicit content made her aesthetic feel dated, the women who'd worked within it largely disappeared from the record along with it.

The Penthouse rejection letter that Yeager kept in her archive, the one that told her her style didn't match their contemporary mood, is a useful document. It marks the precise moment when the industry moved on. For Yeager, it was a professional setback she eventually recovered from. For most of the women she photographed, that cultural shift simply erased whatever thin trace of them had existed.

What Gets Preserved

Bettie Page became famous for reasons that had as much to do with timing, persistence, and a particular quality of presence as with the images themselves. Yeager understood this. "I made her into different characters," she said of Page, "because I wanted to show how women are viewed by men, who of course have different ideas of women. They don't see the real girl. They see her as something else." The same was true of everyone Yeager shot. The camera produced a version, not a person. The version was what survived. For Audrey Munson, America's first supermodel a generation earlier, the outcome of that same dynamic had been devastating: famous as an image, forgotten as a human being, ultimately institutionalised and erased.

Dinnie Sutton's photographs are on sale right now. The BTY Gallery, which manages Yeager's estate, sells archival pigment prints from the original negatives. The prints are clean, well-lit, and beautifully composed. They tell you nothing about who she was, where she came from, what she did before or after the shoot, or whether she's still alive. The label says "Dinnie Sutton, photographed by Bunny Yeager, 1960s." That's all there is.

That gap, between the preserved image and the vanished person, is what makes Yeager's archive both remarkable and uncomfortable. She was, by every account, a photographer who genuinely respected the women she worked with. She knew their names, she labelled her folders, she stayed in touch with Maria Stinger for years. She was, by the standards of the industry she worked in, unusually careful. And still, most of them disappeared.

The archive is full of names. What it doesn't contain is lives.