SLIM AARONS
Coffee Table Books
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Women
Slim Aarons: Women explores the central subject off Slim Aarons's career — the extraordinary women who inhabited the upper echelons of society, the arts, fashion, and Hollywood, from the late 1940s through the 1980s. This book features a host of unforgettable personalities — among them, some of the who shared Slim's life and work: his daughter, Mary Aarons; his wife, Rita Dewart Aarons; the Austrian princess and socialite Manni Wittgenstein; the Avon heiress Baroness Terry von Pantz; and the Roman photographer Elisabetta Catalano. The collection also contains his most iconic images of renowned figures, such as Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Eva Gabor, Marlene Dietrich, Jackie Kennedy, Babe Paley, the Duchess of Windsor, and more. The photographs included here have been culled from Slim's vast body of work with the goal of presenting little-known material that has never been published in book form. In some cases, famous images are paired with several unpublished outtakes from the original photo shoot, offering an unprecedented glimpse into how Slim worked and his mastery of environmental portraiture. One of Slim's closest colleagues, Laura Hawk, introduces his photographs and provides detailed captions, recounting observations and anecdotes gleaned from working with him for more than a decade. The exclusive realm that Slim so deftly navigated is amply revealed in this collection of more than 250 photographs, with a tight focus on the women who typified this world. Showcasing beautiful women at their most glamorous in some of the most dazzling locations across the globe, Slim Aarons: Women is a fresh look at the acclaimed photographer through the muses who inspired his most enduring photographs.
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Poolside
With Slim Aarons, like Once Upon a Time and A Place in the Sun, offers gorgeous images of the glamorous and the wealthy, of jet-lagged jetsetters, of beautiful people living fabulous lives. Yet this new photographic collection, still a compendium of the rich and well connected "doing attractive things" in their favorite playgrounds, offers a new theme: POOLS, and everything that goes with them. Here are magnificent, suntanned bodies; well-oiled skin; bikini-clad women; summer cocktails on sun-drenched verandahs; sumptuous buffets; spectacular locations; and, most of all, fun. This new volume of Slim's work is not so much a who's who of society, aristocracy, and celebrity — though C. Z. Guest, Lilly Pulitzer, Cheryl Tiegs, Peter Beard, Louis Jourdan, Kirk Douglas, and many others make an appearance — as it is a look at how these members of a rarified world spend their leisure time. In Poolside, curious voyeurs will be allowed a peek into privileged lives, to which Slim Aarons was given unprecedented access in his heyday during the sixties, seventies, and eighties. From the Bahamas to Italy, from Mexico to Monaco, Poolside with Slim Aarons whisks readers away to exclusive clubs and private retreats where dreams become realities and taste, style, luxury, and grandeur prevail.
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La Dolce Vita
It was in postwar Rome that Slim Aarons realized his professional mission in life: to photograph, in his now famous phrase, "attractive people who were doing attractive things in attractive places." The photographer had survived World War II, witnessing the fall of Tobruk, the Anzio invasion, and the liberation of Rome, and had come away from it with a distinct aversion to war, a career as a photojournalist, and a passion for Italy. After leaving the army for a brief stint in Hollywood, he relocated to Rome when Life magazine opened a bureau there. In those luminous late 1940s, when Rome and the world were coming back to life, Slim Aarons discovered his great subject: the cavalcade of high society and aristocracy and celebrity and the settings where this special class of people displayed themselves to best effect. The Beautiful People who flocked to Rome in those years would become Slim Aarons's principal subjects for the next fifty years. Italy too would be an enduring theme, as he would return year in and year out to photograph the aristocracy, the cultural elite, and the international jet set who found sanctuary in the country's most beautiful places. And when in Rome, he would always take the same room at the Excelsior Hotel as he had when he lived there in the 1940s. Tracing a journey from the 1940s to the 1990s, this lavish fourth volume in Abrams's Slim Aarons collection revels in this photographer's love affair with Italy — its magnificent cities and towns and landscapes, its fashionable resorts, the pleasures of the Italian art of living — and offers a glimpse into the lives of its preeminent families in formal and informal circumstances, photographed in their palaces and on their estates, at their vacation villas and in other favorite haunts. The images collected in this book paint the cultural geography of fifty years in Italy and distill one photographer's vision of la dolce vita. The introduction by Christopher Sweet shares stories from Aarons's years in Italy and new insights about his life and career.
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Style
When given the chance Slim Aarons would be the first to proudly and enthusiastically admit that he was not a fashion photographer. His own words were, "I don't do fashion. I take photos of people in their own clothes and that becomes fashion." It's a simple premise: These are the Beautiful People, this is how they dress, and soon, this is how you will dress, too. Fashion photography first appeared on the printed page in the early twentieth century in magazines such as Art et Décoration and Vogue. Baron de Meyer and Edward Steichen, two pioneers of the genre, overcame photography's technical limitations by introducing dramatic lighting and custom-built sets to infuse pictures with elements of distinction and chic. Their photographs showed the latest fashions, naturally, but also incorporated avant-garde art and design. Society women, already the main subject and readers of the fashion press, were among the earliest sitters,' often wearing garments from their own wardrobe. The practice was not without controversy — Vogue caused a minor scandal in upper-class circles after publishing a particularly haughty portrait of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney taken by de Meyer in 1913 — but within a few short years the mutually beneficial relationship between fashion photographers and the elite was firmly established. Fashion pictures evolved aesthetically throughout the first half of the twentieth century, but never drifted far from their raison d'être: the promotion of fantasy first and clothes second. At their core, the best fashion pictures are a conspiracy involving the photographer who envisions a role, character, or situation-and the sitter, who plays along (or not).
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Once Upon a Time
It was Aarons who perfected, if not invented, the environmental portrait while photographing the international elite in their exclusive playgrounds during the postwar heyday of the jet-set: his self-described mission, to document attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places. This book is the ultimate insider's view of the lifestyles of the wealthy, privileged, and powerful. From the end of World War ll through the 1980s, Aarons photographed the rich and famous, the beautiful and the celebrated. His postwar portraits form a virtual genealogy of wealth, privilege, and talent — in all its manifestations: Hollywood royalty, European aristocracy, the grande dames of high society, captains of industry, media moguls, statesmen, and stars of every sort. Though upholding the glamorous image of wealth, power, talent, and beauty, he saw himself as a journalist whose duty it was to inform, and this led him to develop the environmental portrait —photographing his subjects at home, at work, at play, and mingling with each other. Indeed, his subjects are almost always shown in a setting synonymous with their station in life. And in a host of memorable portraits, across a vast geography of resorts, spas, estates, palaces, elegant apartments, and other glamorous settings, Slim Aarons's photographs define that legendary class known as the Beautiful People and documents a lost era of style, grace, and the good life.
