Slim Aarons, the photographer who portrayed high society in action

(CNN) – Slim Aarons built a career documenting the lives of the rich and beautiful.

The late photographer spent five decades photographing aristocrats and members of high society in all their glamor, working for publications such as Town & Country, Harper’s Bazaar and Life magazine. Whether lounging in Italian villas, sailing the Monaco coast, or hunting foxes in the English countryside, his globetrotting subjects epitomized high society … and old money.

But according to the author of a new book Regarding Aarons’ work, the photographer’s motive was neither to celebrate nor criticize the opulence he encountered. What moved him was journalistic curiosity about how the world’s most privileged people lived, said Shawn Waldron, co-author of “Slim Aarons: Style.”

“He was a reporter,” Waldron said by phone from New York. “You have to think that many of these photos are created to order. They sent it somewhere to record what was happening in that particular place.”

The Getty Images photo agency acquired the entire Aarons archive in 1997, several years after his retirement. Waldron, who also works as Getty’s curator, said only 6,000 of the roughly 750,000 images have been digitized so far.

At the time of purchase, Aarons was “a little bit forgotten” and “a little bit out of use,” Waldron added. But now, some 15 years after his death, experts and the public are reviewing and reinterpreting the photographer’s vast work. At a time when social media allows jet-setters to closely control the representation of their private lives, his work offers a refreshing and candid glimpse into a bygone era.

And while Aarons moved easily through the more exclusive circles of society, he retained his objectivity and was “down to earth,” says Waldron.

“Obviously, he became friends with some of these people,” he added. “He photographed the subjects as they rose through society and then photographed their children decades later. It’s about long-term relationships … but he was also a fly on the wall and always maintained that professional distance.”

“He was constantly going from place to place, but always coming home to his little farm in Westchester County, New York.”

Style not fashion

Aarons may have spent half a century surrounded by wealth, but his fixation on glamor may be rooted in experiences of poverty and war.

Although the photographer always claimed to be an orphan from New Hampshire, a documentary produced after his death revealed that he came from an immigrant Jewish family from the Lower East Side of New York. With a father absent and his mother admitted to a psychiatric hospital, Aarons “passed between family members,” Waldron said.

Still using his birth name, George Allen Aarons, instead of his later nickname, Slim, he escaped poverty by joining the military as a photographer at age 20.

During World War II, he perfected his art not in polo matches or pool parties, but in military maneuvers, including the ill-fated Allied assaults on Italy at the Battle of Montecassino. The photographer “didn’t care” for his experiences, but they stuck with him, Waldron said.

“A lot of people who were a photographer in the war, whether it’s army photographers or war correspondents … they just stuck with it. And Slim said, ‘No, I’ve seen enough,'” Waldron said, referring to the famous reply. from Aarons to the suggestion that he also document the Korean War. (“I will only photograph a beach if there is a blonde on it,” he said supposedly the photographer).

Waldron’s new title is the latest in a thematic book series about the photographer, published in recent years. Focusing on the photographer’s interactions with the world of fashion, his 180 photographs show a series of style icons, such as Gianni Versace on Lake Como and model Veruschka von Lehndorff playing limbo in Acapulco.

The photos also trace the evolution of luxury fashion over the decades, from the formality of the postwar years to the patterned ski jackets of the 1990s. However, although Aarons did do some mainstream fashion shoots early on of her career, she avoided gender norms. He never used a stylist, and often carried little more than a camera and tripod, so he did not relate to the fantasy associated with fashion photography, Waldron said.

“Fashion photography is about creating a story and typology and representing it … but Slim didn’t want to do that,” Waldron said. “He was interested in the real person, not just what he was wearing, but what he was driving, where he was going to have dinner afterward. It’s about all the parts that make up personal style. That’s what he really connected with.”

Herein lies what Waldron described as the difference between fashion and style, between the transitory and the timeless. In fact, Aarons seemed not to care about his subjects’ closets or current trends.

“I didn’t do fashion,” the photographer once said. “I photographed people with their clothes that became fashion.”

“Slim Aarons: Style“Written by Shawn Waldron and Kate Betts, and published by Abrams Books, is out now.