Slim Aarons: Once Upon a Time

The Library Essay

Privilege Posed for Him Willingly

Slim Aarons came home from the Second World War a decorated combat photographer and chose, in his own summary of the assignment, to photograph attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places. For half a century the rich of Palm Beach, Acapulco, Capri and the Alps let him into their pools and drawing rooms without press-agent supervision, because he was one of the house party, and because his pictures flattered by simply describing.

This 2003 Abrams retrospective gathers the postwar decades of that access, poolside geometries, terrace lunches and dynasties arranged on their own lawns. The photographs have outlived their subjects as social history of a vanished leisure class, recorded in colours nobody has quite matched since.