One of cinema’s greatest virtues is how it functions as a populist access point to art. Not only is the medium itself a collaboration between artists of many talents—photographers, writers, actors, costumers, sculptors, set designers, musicians, make-up artists, etc.—but its documentary branch can also document and distribute fine-art images to the widest audience possible, making fine art objects readily accessible to virtually everyone. While it could be prohibitively expensive to travel the world seeing the great works in person or to collect high-end art books that present them in the best 2D renderings available, it doesn’t cost all that much to watch a movie. With enough patience & a library card, you can even access most documentaries about fine artists for free. There’s obviously something lost in not seeing a large-scale oil painting in person or hearing a world-class musician perform from across the room, but fine-art photography is especially apt for the documentary treatment, since montages of still photographs largely function the same way as catching a photographer’s career-retrospective slideshow in a physical art gallery. Thanks to the movies, I’ve seen hundreds of photographs from the likes of Nan Goldin, Lauren Greenfield, Ernest Cole, and George Dureau that would have cost exorbitant sums of money & time to track down in other venues. Formally, documentaries about photographers don’t need to try very hard to be worthwhile. A feature-length slideshow narrated by talking heads who know the artist personally is already well worth any art-enthusiast’s time, especially if you don’t live the kind of life that allows you to travel to Paris, London, and New York City between shifts at your soul-crushing 9 to 5.

It might seem a little flippant to praise a documentary for providing wide public access to vintage nudie pics as if they were the cultural equal to Guernica or the Mona Lisa, but vintage cheesecake photographer Bunny Yeager has well earned that art-realm prestige. The new documentary Naked Ambition argues that Yeager should be recognized for her artistic & political merit as a skilled portraitist, pushing back against her superficial reputation as the pornographer who made Bettie Page the world’s most famous pin-up model. However, that work has already been done by fine art curators in recent years, who have staged retrospectives of Yeager’s work in legitimizing gallery spaces instead of the nudie mags where her photos were more traditionally exhibited. Even if Bunny Yeager were “just” a pornographer, her contributions to the visual lexicon of American pop art would still be worthy of a career-retrospective gallery show or documentary. Her iconic collaborations with Page and her aesthetic-defining contributions to Playboy‘s early, semi-literary days helped define an entire genre of vintage American smut that has been gradually disseminated & recontextualized enough that her artistic influence is now immeasurable. She also has a great print-the-legend story as “the world’s prettiest photographer,” having started as a pin-up model herself before learning how to operate a camera. As profiled here, Bunny Yeager was just as highly fashionable as she was highly ambitious. Her career as a public spectacle affords the movie more than enough vintage talk show clips, nudie cutie excerpts, and celebrity name-dropping anecdotes to fill its 73-minute runtime, but the real treasure is the access it gives the public to high-quality scans of her photographs. Like Bunny herself, they consistently look fantastic and convey a timeless cool.

If there’s any value to Naked Ambition outside of its function as a Bunny Yeager slideshow, it’s in its peripheral portrait of Miami, Florida sleaze from the 1950s through the 1970s. Alongside young feminist talking heads who link Yeager’s work to modern phenomena like burlesque revues, Insta selfies, and OnlyFans modeling, the doc also drags out a few surviving old-timers from Yeager’s heyday to attest to the grease & sleaze of vintage Miami living. The late, erratic news anchor Larry King is a surprise MVP in that respect, telling wild stories about how easy it was to get laid in his radio broadcast days that have no direct relevance to Yeager’s work except to establish the mise-en-scène in which it was created. There are also brief glimpses into the private lives of Sammy Davis, Jr. and the surprisingly gravel-voiced Bettie Page that happen to appear in anecdotes, but for the most part Yeager’s social life appeared to be more domestic than glamorous. As much as Yeager’s skill & fashionability elevated her work to fine-art quality, it was still produced as commercial material meant to financially provide for her family. Her surviving daughters are in an ongoing dispute about whether to treat the work she’s left behind as archive-worthy art or disposable smut, but they at least appear to agree that they were raised in a loving home with emotionally present parents. If you read between the lines during their opposing interviews, there is some juicy drama to be found here in how Bunny Yeager is being remembered by the people who loved her most, but that domestic conflict isn’t really any of Naked Ambition‘s business. The movie cares most about the work itself, which is presented in constant art-gallery slideshow. Assuming the public display of nude breasts can no longer shock a modern audience, there is nothing especially surprising or daring about that cinematic presentation, but there is something greatly virtuous about its ease of access.

-Brandon Ledet