WOPHA – Opening Night: Photographing Myself

The opening reception of “Photographing Myself: Bunny Yeager .” Photographing Myself: Bunny Yeager presents a feminist intervention by curator Aldeide Delgado into How I Photograph Myself (1964), a landmark photobook by pioneering Miami-based photographer Bunny Yeager (1929–2014). Yeager began her career as a pin-up model before establishing herself as a photographer in the 1950s. Moving across photography, modeling, writing, filmmaking, and fashion, she became one of the most influential figures in American photography of the 1950s and 1960s. In How I Photograph Myself, Yeager turned the camera toward herself, staging her image through clothing, makeup, hairstyles, poses, props, and locations. Taking the book as its point of departure, the exhibition presents selected and intervened fragments from the publication, contextualizing Yeager’s photoperformative practice through her own voice and reconsidering her legacy through questions of agency, self-representation, the male gaze, and female spectatorship. Yeager’s work enters into dialogue with contemporary artists Naomi Fisher and Val Souza, whose practices explore desire, feminism, performance, the body, and visual culture. The exhibition presents rarely seen work by Miami-based Fisher and marks the first presentation of Brazilian artist Val Souza’s work in the United States.