Poolside With Slim Aarons

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Slim liked to arrive early and sometimes stay until martini time, as the setting sun kissed the contours of the scenes around him. Zachary wrote in his introduction to the book: “Slim has documented the life of the rich, the privileged, and the leisured for fifty years. Swanson on Swanson was the product of a literary quadrangle with all the emotional complexity—and sexual tension—of her immortal comeback vehicle, Sunset Boulevard. Neuware -Like its predecessors, 'Once Upon a Time' and 'A Place in the Sun', 'Poolside with Slim Aarons' offers images of jet-setters and the wealthy, of beautiful, glittering people living the glamorous life. Decades later, those same images from another era, through their buoyant mood and almost fetishistic attention to detail, have continued to hold sway over today’s influencers in the worlds of fashion, design, and advertising—a group of tastemakers who simply can’t get enough of Aarons’s idealized depictions of the good life.

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. Even as war zones continued to beckon his pals from Life (such as Robert Capa, David Douglas Duncan, and Carl Mydans), Slim turned his lens on the playgrounds of Gstaad and Mallorca, Bali and Beverly Hills. In the winter of 1954, the attractive person doing the attractive thing in the attractive place was Lorita (or Rita), his new wife, formerly an assistant at Life, swimming beneath the Hollywood sign and a Christmas tree. By depicting these well-heeled, well-turned-out men and women in leisure settings (yachts on the Caspian, ski chalets in Verbier) and in their native attire (sundresses, smoking jackets, hunting gear), he transformed his subjects into stealth style icons. I mean, I enjoy money, I like pools, and I love exotic locales but I was so uninterested in rich people vacationing in gorgeous locations, hanging out by pools.

An oft-cited example of this approach is his 1970 Poolside Gossip [4] shot at the Kaufmann Desert House designed by Richard Neutra, with owner Nelda Linsk as one of the models in the photo. Giclée (/ʒiːˈkleɪ/ zhee-KLAY) is a neologism, ultimately derived from the French word gicleur, coined in 1991 by printmaker Jack Duganne for fine art digital prints made using inkjet printers. He worked as a photographer at West Point military academy and later as a combat photographer following and documenting the horrors of the war across Northern Africa and Europe. People were beginning to understand: Slim had reduced the essence of a vanishing age into its tincture—a kind of high-life mood board that also informed the aesthetic of the here and now. Former fashion model Helen Dzo Dzo Kaptur (in white lace) and Nelda Linsk (in yellow), wife of art dealer Joseph Linsk, at the Kaufmann Desert House in Palm Springs, California, January 1970.

I did not care for the intro which some of I found repulsive and immoral same with some of the pictures.My son asked me if I’d heard of the photographer Slim Aarons and I remembered looking at his photographs of beautiful people by beautiful pools 40 years ago - so I looked him up at the library and found this book focused on just that- beautiful people by beautiful pools. Breaking his silence four decades after ghostwriting the book, Wayne Lawson sets the record straight about who did what to whom. His sunny portraits of postwar affluence captured the habits and habitats of the elite—and of the wider stylish class, whose socialites commingled with bohemians and trendsetters. Sitting with the book, flicking through the pages, you are drawn into a period of ‘jet set utopianism’ enjoyed by the fabulously wealthy and captured by “the photo laureate of theupper classes”, as the New York Timesonce phrased it. 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.

Though Los Angeles was a city Slim and his wife spent a bit of time in, the house was not one they ever occupied—simply a set that offered a marvelous view of the Hollywood sign. Rita served as muse several times for her husband, and when she wasn’t the subject of the photo, she helped add to the just-so-happened-glamour of Slim’s mise-en-scènes.Young Slim, evidently not knowing what had become of either parent, had been raised at different times by an aunt in the tristate area, an orphanage, and with his grandmother and cousins in New Hampshire. Instagram is a funny place, a platform for anonymous individuals to launch themselves into the public eye and for the already famous to maintain their renown. He died in 2006—he would be 104 right now—but if he were alive, and if we tried to explain this to him, how his pictures have a life all over the world, by all sorts of demographics, it would be beyond,” says Mary. Slim Aarons (born George Allen Aarons; October 29, 1916 – May 30, 2006) was an American photographer noted for his images of socialites, jet-setters and celebrities. Upon Slim’s death, a relative brought to light the fact that Slim was born to a poor, Jewish, Yiddish-speaking immigrant family in the Lower East Side.

Offers images of jet-setters and the wealthy, of beautiful, glittering people living the glamorous life. And because it’s not Slim Aarons unless there’s an element of lavish frivolity, a Christmas tree emerges from the water, festooned with swags of aluminum-foil-colored tinsel and metallic bows. After my conversation with Slim’s daughter, who tells me she’s just hours into her Christmas holiday which she will spend cozy at home in Gloucester, Massachusetts, surrounded by snow and a fire, she speaks with her mother for more details about her photogenic but unpleasant Christmas swim. Not because Slim painted a partly fictional picture of his youth, but because of the loneliness it must have instilled in him.With his mischievous smile, blithe spirit, and a knack for self-deprecation, he came across as a little boy lost. Attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places,” Aarons famously once said to describe his practice. It could be Katy Perry lying in a pool, other than the fact that it would be a much fancier house and a much fancier tree.