Fashion photography is about creating a story and a typology and acting it out … but Slim didn’t want to do that,” Waldron said. “He was interested in the real person – not only what they were wearing, but what they were driving, where they’d go to dinner afterward. It’s about all the different parts that make personal style. That’s what he really connected with.” These are the exceptions, however; throughout, Aarons’s portraits attest wholeheartedly to his intention to make the good life look even better, while also telling us as much about the person behind the camera as the people in front. “In society circles, he was very well known and accepted,” says Hawk, “It was understood that he would never let an unflattering photograph go out there. If he had, it would have affected how he would have been received, so he guarded the outtakes with his life.” Had he not, his photographs might have been a great deal more intriguing – and revealing. The photo agency Getty Images acquired Aarons’ entire archive in 1997, several years after his retirement. Waldron, who also works as a Getty curator, said that only 6,000 of the approximately 750,000 images have been digitized so far. Aarons may have spent half a century surrounded by affluence, but his fixation on glamour may have been rooted in experiences of poverty and war.

Slim Aarons, ‘Poolside Gossip Recreating the Iconic Photo by Slim Aarons, ‘Poolside Gossip

Laure de La Haye‐Jousselin at the gates to her château in Normandy, 1957. Slim waited four days in the village of Saint‐Aubind’Écrosville to get this shot. Once the scene was set, he not only managed to get the subject to engage with the camera, but got her horse and two dogs to cooperate as well. As Slim’s longtime friend and editor Frank Zachary observed, ‘Slim managed to get the horse to raise his hoof. A real, honest‐to‐God 17th‐century portrait.’ Photograph: Slim Aarons/Getty. Caption: Laura Hawk My problem with flipping through Slim Aarons books, is that while his photos are amazing, they look better online than they do in print. He obviously became close to some of these people,” he added. “He photographed subjects as they came up through society and then photographed their children decades later. These are long-term relationships… but he was also very (much) of a fly on the wall and always kept that professional distance. Kleenex heir Jim Kimberly (far left, in orange) talks with friends on the shores of Lake Worth, Florida in 1968. Slim Aarons/Getty Images The championship swimmer and movie star Esther Williams poolside in Florida, circa 1955. Williams was the darling of both the aquatic and the film worlds. Unable to compete in the 1940 Olympic Games because of the war, she joined Billy Rose’s Aquacade in San Francisco, where she swam with Tarzan star Johnny Weissmuller—a five-time Olympic gold medallist himself – and caught the attention of MGM scouts. At the pinnacle of her movie career, from 1945 to 1949, the actress dubbed ‘the Million Dollar Mermaid’ had at least one film in the top 20 box office hits each year. Photograph: Slim Aarons/Getty. Caption: Laura Hawk

I didn’t do fashion,” the photographer once said. “I did the people in their clothes that became the fashion.” What a fun coffee table style book! The content is interesting, but at times pulls away from the beautiful photos, so I found myself skimming the writing and studying the photos instead. Aarons captured high-society women and their lavish lifestyles throughout his career, traveling to places like Las Vegas, Bermuda, and Acapulco, where they’d lounge poolside at resorts. He went to their extravagant Palm Beach homes, Spanish villas, and photographed one woman in a Czechoslovakian castle. This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by Slim Aarons: Women explores the central subject of Slim Aarons’s career—the extraordinary women from the upper echelons of high society, the arts, fashion, and Hollywood.

Slim Aarons: Women - Google Books Slim Aarons: Women - Google Books

Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth Still using his birth name George Allen Aarons, rather than his later moniker Slim, he escaped poverty by joining the army as a photographer in his early 20s. Serving during World War II, he honed his craft not at polo matches or pool parties, but in military maneuvers including the Allies’ ill-fated assaults against Italy in the Battle of Monte Cassino. The photographer later “made light” of his experiences, but they stayed with him, Waldron said. The book presents the women who most influenced Aarons’s life and work—and the other remarkable personalities he photographed along the way—including Audrey Hepburn, the Duchess of Windsor, Diana Vreeland, Esther Williams, Marianne Faithful, and Marlene Dietrich, all featured in unforgettable photographs. The collection contains more than 250 images, the majority of which have not appeared in previous books, along with detailed captions written by one of Aarons’s closest colleagues, Laura Hawk. PARTY MIX | An outtake from Slim Aarons’s iconic shoot at the Kaufmann Desert House, designed by Richard Neutra, in Palm Springs, California, 1970. Photo: Slim Aarons Herein lies what Waldron described as the difference between fashion and style – between the transient and the timeless. Indeed, Aarons appeared unconcerned about his subjects’ wardrobes or the trends of the day.But according to the author of a new book on Aarons’ work, the photographer’s motive was neither to celebrate nor critique the opulence he encountered. He was driven by a journalistic curiosity about how the world’s most privileged people lived, said Shawn Waldron, who co-wrote “Slim Aarons: Style.” Waldron’s new title is the latest in a series of thematic books on the photographer, published in recent years. Focusing on the photographer’s interactions with the fashion world, its 180 photographs feature a host of style icons, including Gianni Versace on Lake Como and model Veruschka von Lehndorff doing the limbo in Acapulco. Olivier Coquelin, who opened the first American discotheque, and his wife, the Hawaiian singer and actress Lahaina Kameha. Slim Aarons/Getty Images Working for publications like Town & Country, Harper’s Bazaar and Life magazine, the late photographer spent five decades taking unapologetically glamorous pictures of aristocrats and socialites. Whether lounging in Italian villas, boating off the coast of Monaco or foxhunting in the English countryside, his globetrotting subjects epitomized high society – and old money. I’m going to have fun photographing attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places, and maybe take some attractive photographs as well.”