It was Slim Aarons who taught the haute monde to say, “Cheese.” And, in the process, the New York lensman, who has been called the “photo laureate of the upper classes,” created a visual vocabulary of glamour that spans 60 years – more, if you consider his enduring influence on fashion and modern photography.
“Every picture told a story,” Mary Aarons said of her father’s oeuvre on a recent visit to New York. She knows their backstories, too. She spent summers travelling Europe with him and assisting on nearly a hundred of his shoots in London, Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Greece, where he captured famous faces while they sailed, skied and carried on.
It has been nine years since Slim’s death, at the age of 90, but Mary still sees his influence, she says, in shelter magazines, on the catwalk, in shows like Mad Men and on platforms like Instagram. In fact, she was in New York, where we spoke, to attend the opening of an exhibit of her father’s work hosted by Exclusive Resorts and Leica, who were holding a Shoot Like Slim Aarons workshop later in the month.
She is flattered by the homages, but notes that her dad’s original shots have a singular sort of magic. “It was the whole mise en place,” Mary explains. “The setting would tell the story of the place or the person.” Socialite C.Z. Guest, for instance, standing erect, and ice-cool, as the eternal hostess of Palm Beach; the Duchess of Windsor dancing with her Duke in the winter of their lives at the Waldorf in New York; the pixie-dusted frames containing dynasties like the Gettys and the Guinnesses.
Such a fixture was Slim in that rarefied world of boldface Americans that he is said to have inspired Jimmy Stewart’s role as the fascinated voyeur in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic Rear Window. She noted that his old apartment, down the street from where we met to talk, near Park Avenue, served as the model for Stewart’s pad in the film.
Eventually, Slim became an MVP for magazines such as Life and Holiday, and his photographs for those publications “extracted everything that was cool and chic about [old money],” as professional style-watcher Simon Doonan has put it. “He left behind all the dusty mumsiness of it and made it look incredibly crisp.”
As much as Slim’s images convey the sense that he and their subjects happened to be in the right place at the right time, it was a produced insouciance, according to Mary. “He would go a day early, and do his research… and if it was a shoot at Piazza San Marco, he would find out when the pigeons got fed. He didn’t have stylists, or lighting people…he did his own research.”
His photo book, A Wonderful Time: An Intimate Portrait of the Good Life, was a sales dud when it appeared in 1974. In more recent decades, however, it has become one of the style world’s sacred texts. It includes many of Slim’s most celebrated images such as Poolside Gossip (which shows impossibly fabulous women exchanging 411 at Richard Neutra’s modernist masterpiece, the Kaufmann House in Palm Springs) or Four Kings of Hollywood (Clark Gable and other macho-men of the moment laughing up a storm at Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills). Mary is partial to the portraits he took of “people from the arts” – T.S. Eliot, in particular, and Truman Capote.
Moreover, she favours “the landscapes, the beautiful boats, the colourful kayaks, the beach umbrellas, the ski-lifts … just all the colours. Photos of happy times.”