Poolside With Slim Aarons

Product Information

In 1997, Getty Images signed on to represent the Slim Aarons collection and now serves as the primary curator of his work. In the documentary it is revealed that Aarons was Jewish and grew up in conditions that were in complete contrast to what he told friends and family of his childhood. Few details are known about the festive photo, one of Slim’s most iconic, but Mary offers some context: “It was a hired house and hired kids, and my mom’s big recollections were that it was a really cold, really dirty pool and that because they wanted everything to line up just right (and obviously it was her husband taking the picture), he made her stay in there a really long time,” says Mary. At 18 years old, Aarons enlisted in the United States Army, worked as a photographer at the United States Military Academy, and later served as a combat photographer in World War II and earned a Purple Heart.

The photographer claimed that the only beaches worth photographing were "decorated with beautiful, semi-nude girls tanning in a tranquil sun. 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.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. Mary, who lovingly keeps up with all the latest discoveries relating to her father, tells me there’s a big debate on the exact address of the house. It’s a book that provides a glimpse into times past- the 60s and 70s when people sat by pools baking in the sun, drinking beautiful cocktails and eating scrumptious food- with amazingly fit bodies and no sunburn.

Beautiful book with beautiful pictures of the good life and of a pastime when people weren't as vulgar or classless. Slim Aarons’ prints of the iconic poolside series are some of the most candid portraits of the 20th century.Slim’s subjects were socialites and literary lights, royals and moguls, ingenues and artists—with the occasional gadabout thrown in for good measure. 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.

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. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on a modified Iris printer in a process invented in the late 1980s. From the Caribbean to Italy and Mexico to Monaco, "Poolside with Slim Aarons" whisks the reader away to an exclusive club where taste, style, luxury and grandeur prevail.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. We work with a network of expert framers, and you can add a selection of frames to an artwork on the artwork page.