“Once upon a time, life was not better. It was different. Once upon a time everything was optimism because nothing was bad for you.
Where is Slim Aarons taking you today? What is it like here, a typical jet set day?
First let me tell you what it isn’t. It is not like any music video you have seen where the men are living large, music blasting, cursing,
yelling, and squirting champagne right from the bottle over Energizer-bunny women lap-dancing near the caviar.
No.
Listen.
The birds. The bougainvillea. Nature’s stillness. Sweet jasmine. The glittering pool. A slow honeybee. What you will notice and
remember most is the exquisite quiet of the rich.
It is your typical jet set day. You wake up around ten and have breakfast in your room, brought to you on a tray; or if you are a
morning sort you go down to the terrace overlooking the pool. By eleven you are sitting at the pool with your host, rehashing what
happened last night: the romances, the wine, the faux pas, any amusing bon mot. You don’t have a cell phone, a laptop, an iPod – they
haven’t been invented yet – so before you’ve come down to the pool you have made your calls efficiently so as not to tie up your host’s
phone line, calling your wife, your lover, your children, your trust officer, your pharmacist…”
-- Christopher Sweet, “A Place in the Sun”
The photographs of Slim Aarons are a journey to the past, depicting a time of glamorous living and relaxed poolside cocktails.
Aarons, born in New Hampshire in 1912, was trained as a photojournalist and served in WW II as a photographer. After the
was Aaron but came into his own photographing for magazines such as Town and Country, Vogue, Life, and Travel + Leisure,
which introduced him to many of his later subjects in upper class American society. It was there that Aarons established his
name as the portrait photographer of the rich and famous. His subjects have included Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Marilyn Monroe,
Guy Vidal, and Kirk Douglas, to name a few.
Aarons’ rich and saturated color images are an intimate peek into the very private lives, to which Slim Aarons was given
unprecedented access in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties. As Aarons himself said, his mission was to “photograph
attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places,” which is exactly what he did.
Slim Aarons died on May 29, 2006, at the age of eighty-nine. His work continues to be exhibited and collected on an
international level.
