Photo of Paz de la Huerta by Bunny Yeager.

Bunny Yeager is a South Florida icon, and also a pioneer in a way many wouldn’t recognize. While she may be best known as the hand behind some of the most famous “pin-up” photographs from the 1950s and ’60s, most famously Bettie Page, the fact that she was a woman, and a model, herself made her a trailblazer.

Never shy of shooting seductive pictures of women, semi-clad, in tropical or beach settings – reflective of her South Florida home – she was never exploitative of the subjects she photographed. She loves the human form, and the female one in particular, and made a career out of framing it.

The Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale is opening an appropriately titled exhibit, “Bunny Yeager: Both Sides of the Camera” to explore the life and work of Yeager. The photographer has explained in the past how, as a woman herself, the female body has unique characteristics that should be revealed, and indeed flaunted, without being rudely exposed. Indeed, as the museum explains, the focus of her camera was of models who “look energetic, confident, independent and imbued with a vitality not necessarily found in the work of her male contemporaries.”

With this kind of understanding, Yeager would go on to focus the camera on herself, publishing for instance the 1964 manual “How I Photograph Myself.” The show will be a survey of her photographs from the 1950s to the present, as she continues to work up to today.

In this vein, other artists such as Cindy Sherman (who photographs herself in various disguises or roles) would follow, and the museum has a complementary exhibit called “Woman’s World: Contemporary Views of Women by Women.” Curated by former MAM curator Peter Boswell, this  highlights such extraordinary talents as Sherman, Annie Leibovitz, Lorna Simpson, Diane Arbus and Shirin Neshat – hard to beat that lineup, regardless of gender.

“Bunny Yeager: Both Sides of the Camera” and “Woman’s World: Contemporary Views of Women by Women” open on June 22 at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, 1 East Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale; www.moafl.org.