Bunny Yeager, a model-turned-photographer whose images of a scarcely clad Bettie Page, embodying feral sexuality and winsome naïveté all at once, helped propel Ms. Page to international stardom as a midcentury pinup queen, died on Sunday in North Miami, Fla. She was 85.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said her agent, Ed Christin.

Ms. Yeager, who took up her art by accident, was one of the world’s most celebrated photographers of female nudes and near-nudes of the 1950s and ’60s. She is widely credited with helping turn the erotic pinup — long a murky enterprise in every sense of the word — into high photographic art.

Her work appeared in Playboy, for which she shot a string of centerfolds, and in a spate of postwar men’s magazines whose names — Cavalier, Escapade, Nugget, Fling, Sunbathing, National Police Gazette, Figure Quarterly — recall a bygone era of salacious innocence.

Ms. Yeager’s work, which fell dormant in the 1970s and remained so for decades as many of those magazines folded, has lately enjoyed a renaissance.