Poolside With Slim Aarons

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In 1997, Getty Images signed on to represent the Slim Aarons collection and now serves as the primary curator of his work.

On the gram, you get what you give, and so it’s peculiar for the app to have had such an impact on a nonuser.Like its predecessors, Once Upon a Time and A Place in the Sun , Poolside with Slim Aarons offers images of jet-setters and the wealthy, of beautiful, glittering people living the glamorous life. Just before social media took off, in the 1990s and early 2000s—and the taste for good taste and fine design became the rage and then the rule—copies of A Wonderful Time proved to be rare collector’s items, selling online for thousands of dollars. As a boy his mother was diagnosed with mental health issues and admitted to a psychiatric hospital, which caused him to be passed around among relatives. In 1997, Mark Getty, the co-founder of Getty Images, visited Aarons in his home and bought Aarons' entire archive. Aarons was born to Yiddish-speaking immigrants who had lived in a tenement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

The main character is pools, and everything that goes with them—magnificent, suntanned bodies; well-oiled skin; bikini-clad women; yachts; summer cocktails; sumptuous buffets; spectacular locations; and most of fun. In a career that spanned six decades, Aarons’ camera lens moved from soldiers to stars and celebrities. His sunny portraits of postwar affluence captured the habits and habitats of the elite—and of the wider stylish class, whose socialites commingled with bohemians and trendsetters. Architectural Digest may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers.After my conversation with Slim’s daughter, who tells me she’s just hours into her Christmas holiday which she will spend cozy at home in Gloucester, Massachusetts, surrounded by snow and a fire, she speaks with her mother for more details about her photogenic but unpleasant Christmas swim.