Slim Aarons once defined his job as “photographing attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places”. For 50 years, he did just that, using his charm and charisma to coax the rich and beautiful to pose for him in elaborate settings that reflected their elite status. Beginning in the late 1940s, he established himself, in the words of an associate at Life magazine, where many of the portraits were published, as “the preeminent chronicler of American and European society in the postwar period”.
A new book, Slim Aarons: Women, traces his journey from jobbing photographer for Life magazine in Rome to portraitist to the wealthy. Page after page reveals an unreal world which, from the perspective of contemporary global celebrity, seems at the same time impossibly distant and oddly familiar: socialites in their mansions, film stars by their pools… Aarons earned the trust of the very rich – Jackie Kennedy, Princess Grace of Monaco, Imelda Marcos – and the very famous – Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe, Errol Flynn – as well as a passing parade of young women at play on yachts, at exclusive beach resorts or in their expensive homes.
The rich, as F Scott Fitzgerald famously noted, “are different from you and me”, but, as Aarons’s photographs attest, they now also seem very different from what they once were: less elegant, certainly, their excesses more in tune with our brash, narcissistic culture. Or, perhaps it is simply a trick of the soft, luxurious light in which Aarons gilded his subjects. Here and there, his portraits prefigure the detached formalism of contemporary art photography – Thomas Struth’s portraits of rich families spring to mind – but mostly they are content to glamorise the already glamorous.
“It fascinated me how he could court and charm these people while not being mesmerised by them,” says Laura Hawk, who worked as his assistant from the early 1980s until his death in 2006. “His brushing shoulders with the rich and famous did not affect how he lived his life or his tastes. He had absolutely no desire to hang out with his subjects at the end of the day and he did not expect invitations to the yacht or the exclusive club. He worked to a tight schedule and wanted to get back to his farm as quickly as possible.”
For all that, Aarons’s images appear almost fawning , fetishising society women’s wealth, beauty and privilege, creating a world that is almost make-believe in its elegance and glamour. In her fascinating first-hand introduction to the book, Hawk posits Aarons as a pioneer of the “environmental portrait”, wherein the setting is as important in its telling details as the subject. “Slim had an almost childlike desire to idealise each mise-en-scène,” she writes, “to embellish the everyday scenarios he found with his idea – his fantasy – of what their world of leisure should look like. The portraits he created tell a story, and the arrangement of the visual details are the pieces of his fiction.” Not so much a portraitist then, as a fantasist.
Where, though, did Slim Aarons’s devotion to depicting this exaggerated idea of the good life begin? He grew up in rural New Hampshire, where his grandmother gave him his first camera in an attempt to give structure to his unsettled teenage years. He took to photography immediately and, on enlisting in the army just after the outbreak of the second world war, was given the post of military newspaper photographer – he subsequently covered the invasion of Anzio without proper accreditation and sustained head injuries when a shell hit the press corps headquarters. Decorated for bravery, he returned a hero and began working as a stringer for various local papers before landing a job as Rome correspondent for Life magazine when they opened a bureau in the city. “He emerged from the second world war both disillusioned and determined and I really believe his motivations came from there,” says Hawk, “He never set out to be a photographer of the rich and famous, but it just so happened that he landed a job for an upscale magazine and gravitated to that world. He was essentially a magazine photographer: he worked for the same magazine using the same formula for three decades.”
Aarons was meticulous to the point of obsessive in his approach. “We’d fly out to the location, stay 10 days and fly home,” says Hawk, laughing. “And those 10 days always broke down the same way: we’d go out looking for exteriors, do pick-up shots and informal portraits at resorts or luncheons and then set up the big shoot in the house.”
What was he like to work for? “Initially, it was confusing and a bit bewildering because I could never place him. Slim was an arch conservative and not shy about expounding his views. He loved to hold court and tell stories. He had charisma and he could turn on the charm, but he was also difficult and demanding. I had to do whatever was asked, including being a bouncer on outdoor shoots when the inevitable curious tourist would come up to ask what we were doing. He hated that, absolutely hated it. I’d have to say he was different with a capital D. You never knew what was coming next.”
For me, the most illuminating portraits are the few that exude a more human, that is, flawed, aspect. His portrait of the influential art collector and socialite Peggy Guggenheim at home in her palazzo, next to a Picasso, seems almost humble amid the baroque exteriors and painted faces elsewhere. In short, she looks real. Elsewhere, he captures a foppish Mick Jagger with Marianne Faithfull attending a banquet in Co Kildare as guests of Desmond Guinness. It was taken in 1968, the same year the Rolling Stones released Street Fighting Man. The portrait says much more about Jagger’s social aspirations than any of his songs ever did.
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.
Slim Aarons: Women, introduced by Laura Hawk is published next month by Abrams, £55. Click here to buy it for £45.10
