WHAT SLIM SAW

“I believe in fairytales. For six decades I have concentrated on photographing attractive people who were doing attractive things in attractive places.” These words have the ring of F. Scott Fitzgerald about them: they could have been spoken by a Nick Carraway or Dick Diver, and would make a suitable introduction to a novella or short story. But they belong to Slim Aarons, and he used them to introduce his 2003 photomemoir, Once Upon a Time. A few years earlier Getty had bought the Aarons archive, and this was the book that presented the Aarons oeuvre to a generation unborn when he had been at his zenith. The publication marked the return and rehabilitation of one of the most remarkable chroniclers of high society during the second half of the 20th century. He died three years later, aged 89, but happily he lived long enough to witness a revival of interest in his work.

“I believe in fairytales. For six decades I concentrated on photographing attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places.”

This was not the first Slim Aarons book. Almost 30 years earlier he had published A Wonderful Time: An Intimate Portrait of the Good Life. In its pre-Christmas round-up of books in December 1974, The New York Times did not hold back, describing it as “the most repelling” of photography books published that year, “a survey of rich homes, people and resorts that manages to make even T.S. Eliot look decadent”. (By contrast, in the same round-up, Leni Riefenstahl, the glamoriser-in-chief of the Third Reich, came off rather better: her photographic study of an obscure Sudanese tribe was described as “haunting”.)

To be fair to the , this was the age of Watergate, the oil shock, and the final act of the war in Vietnam, — was not in the mood for lavish and lush photography depicting the idle rich at play. Now, of course, is a collector’s item selling for thousands, and even a first edition of won’t leave you much change from a grand.