All images © Slim Aarons, courtesy of Getty Images and Enter Gallery
Welcome to the World of Slim Aarons displays some of the artist’s most iconic images documenting the life of his glittering subjects
A family dines al fresco on a terrace hanging over the turquoise waters of Capri, Italy. A speedboat approaches its landing, watched by two lean and tanned subjects. Two bikini-clad women play checkers by the poolside. Slim Aarons’s images are almost imperative visuals of the summer season and it’s hard to resist being drawn into the iconic photographer’s prestige world. To help us wave goodbye to summer, Enter Gallery in Brighton is exhibiting a selection of Aaron’s beloved images depicting – as the photographer put it himself – “attractive people who were doing attractive things in attractive places.”
From the 1950s until the 1980s, Aarons’s images were perhaps the prototype of the ‘Instagrammable’ location shot. The dream destinations of his images and his attractive, rich subjects – counting the Kennedy family, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and Grace Kelly – have remained cultural inspirations for some of luxury fashion’s most important tastemakers, gracing the pages of Life, Town & Country, Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar, among others.
“There is something very familiar about the way he shoots the people in his photos. The subjects in his photos are shot quite candidly, there’s a real sense of joy”
The New York and New Hampshire-raised photographer captured the poolsides, cliff side villas and hotels of the rich and famous which were a vast contrast to the political realities at the time, with an American-led war raging in Vietnam among them. But Shawn Waldron, manager of the Slim Aarons Archive at Getty Images and author of Slim Aarons: The Essential Collection, tells BJP his images are also about a universal joy of the simple things in life “which never goes out of style.” Beginning his photography career in the Army during WWII, Aarons’s popular images are a far cry from the combat imagery he was appointed to make across the SWANA region and Europe in his earlier life.
“The artist captured a special time in history,” Helen Hiett, Head of Buying at Enter Gallery, tells BJP, “documenting amazing architecture, fashion, politicians, pop stars and places around the world. His work has a global language, whilst his pieces hang in our Brighton Gallery we ship his photographs around the world, the art being as global as Slim was.”
Some of the images on display in Brighton include the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc on the French Riviera in 1976, a poolside party at a desert house in Palm Springs, designed by Richard Neutra for Edgar J. Kaufmann, and of course, the image of Italian artist and actress Domiziana Giordano, Italian author Francesca Sanvitale, Dino Trappetti and Umberto Terrelli dining al fresco on a terrace overlooking the waters off the coast of the island of Capri in August, 1980. “Owning a Slim Aarons is like owning a slice of history, but with a twist”, explains Hiett, “there is something very familiar about the way he shoots the people in his photos. The subjects in his photos are shot quite candidly, there’s a real sense of joy and intimacy to the work which draws one to it, the human condition transcends the decades.”
But as well as the iconic shots, Enter will be showing some lesser known images too, “it’s really a chance to see the breadth of his journey cataloguing the jet-setters of the golden age of Hollywood and modernist architecture, such as the Kaufmann Desert House by Richard Neutra or travel to luxury utopias from St Tropez to Brazil,” explains Hiett of the universal allure of Aaron’s images. Waldron hopes the audience can take away from the exhibition a deeper appreciation for “Slim’s journey from war correspondent to independent journalist and the incredible legacy and archive he left behind.”
