Bettie Page Fans, Take Note..and Act Quickly

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Andrea and Adam Forgash, dealers of vintage photography in Queens, are selling hundreds of signed prints and contact sheets that the octogenarian photographer Bunny Yeager had filed away at her Florida home. The archive includes many shots of the pin-up queen Bettie Page.

2 CACHES OF BETTIE PAGE (below is from the NYT)

Two major troves of forgotten mid-20th-century pinup photos have emerged on the market in the past few months.

Andrea and Adam Forgash, dealers of vintage photography in Queens, are selling hundreds of signed prints and contact sheets that the octogenarian photographer Bunny Yeager had filed away at her Florida home. On images of men and women in scanty outfits, occasional pen strokes mark where wrinkles and cellulite needed to be retouched.

When the Forgashes set up displays at antiques fairs, the nudes are kept buried in the stacks. “Just so they’re not too saucy” and risk offending unwary passers-by and children, Ms. Forgash said.

Ms. Yeager has also been collaborating with publishers on half a dozen recent surveys of her career, including “Bunny Yeager’s Darkroom: Pin-Up Photography’s Golden Era,” by the historian Petra Mason (Rizzoli), and “Bunny Yeager’s Beautiful Backsides,” by Ms. Yeager herself (Schiffer).

One of Ms. Yeager’s favorite models was Bettie Page, who also posed for the New York photographer Irving Klaw and his circle. Mr. Klaw’s collection of 1,500 snapshots of Page ended up stashed in drawers at Movie Star News, a shop he ran in Manhattan, and the contents of the store will be auctioned in the next few months through Guernsey’s.

Just before the Klaw photos and Page’s leftover bondage whips were boxed up last month, reporters were allowed to leaf through the pictures. Along with the Page section, the drawers contained thousands of images of her colleagues, including Tempest Storm and Blaze Starr. There were multiple copies of prints that apparently had not sold well, including photographs of women looking detached and exhausted, posed with props as dreary as paint solvent cans and air-conditioners.