Slim Aarons’s Photography Caught the Elite in Their Habitats. A New Book Captures a Lost World
Among Slim’s advantages was his own narrative. He passed himself off as a loner, a kind of itinerant, dreamy rascal out of Huckleberry Finn or Our Gang who had been raised as an orphan and was estranged from his extended family. He also came across to those he photographed as being one of them: a sophisticate, a man of the world, and, if pressed, a gentile.
Another plus was his unfussy style. When on assignment, Slim kept his camera gear trim. He worked without strobes or flashes (“I prefer available light,” he said) or photo assistants (he lugged and loaded his own cameras). All he required, he once told me, was to “bring along a beautiful girl Friday, a great-lookin’ researcher—a smasher” who could monopolize his subjects’ attention while Slim, freed from scrutiny, could focus on his photographic prey. Slim liked to arrive early and sometimes stay until martini time, as the setting sun kissed the contours of the scenes around him. His midday photos, as a consequence, can appear airy and bright; his sunset shots, luminous and golden. His streamlined way of working created immediate personal chemistry, letting him establish trust through intimacy while playing to his strong suit as an affable raconteur.
Another of Slim’s specialties was spontaneity. He photographed in a time before stylists and brand managers, before the aristos and arrivistes had a covey of flacks and personal assistants. As a rule, he rendered people in outfits they had conjured up, on the spot, for the shoot. Cabana-casual Bill and Babe Paley in Jamaica. Bahamian vacationers in tennis whites. Poet Gwendolyn Brooks in a white cowl-neck sweater on her Chicago staircase. Viscountess Harriet de Rosiere in a floral print, next to a vase ablaze with color. Bedecked in their own clothes and accessorized by their individual taste or breeding or worldly accomplishments, they were allowed to put their best faces forward, to pose and preen, to express an outward élan. As a consequence, Slim’s subjects were always presented at their finest—at parties or poolside or both; at resorts, in repose, in regalia. “The world recorded by Slim Aarons, thanks to his instantly recognizable body of work,” writes social historian Nick Foulkes in an essay for a new book, Slim Aarons: The Essential Collection, an expansive collection edited by Shawn Waldron and featuring more than 400 photographs, many previously unpublished, “has come down to us in all its sybaritic splendor, shorn of the miseries that infect even the best-lived lives.” The pictures, Foulkes notes, “do not even show the sunburn and mosquito bites. Instead, they present the world of the perennial perfect moment.”
