Serving during World War II, he honed his craft not at polo matches or pool parties, but in military maneuvers including the Allies’ ill-fated assaults against Italy in the Battle of Monte Cassino.

Slim Aarons, Women by Slim Aarons | 9781419722424 | Booktopia Slim Aarons, Women by Slim Aarons | 9781419722424 | Booktopia

The man who would go on to make his living recording the high WASP look of the second half of the 20th century turned out to have been Jewish, the son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants who had lived in a tenement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Though the photographer always claimed to be an orphan from New Hampshire, a documentary produced after his death revealed that he hailed from an immigrant Jewish family in New York City’s Lower East Side. He resented and had no relationship with his father and had a brother, Harry, who would later commit suicide. Even as war zones continued to beckon his pals from Life (such as Robert Capa, David Douglas Duncan, and Carl Mydans), Slim turned his lens on the playgrounds of Gstaad and Mallorca, Bali and Beverly Hills.Photograph: Slim Aarons/Getty Guests relax around the Canellopoulos penthouse pool, Athens, 1961 (detail). After the war, Slim vowed to walk on the sunnier side of the street, opting to photograph girls not guns, bikinis instead of bombs. But now, some 15 years after his death, experts and audiences are revisiting and reinterpreting the photographer’s vast body of work.

Slim Aarons: Women Reveals Intimate Portraits of Jackie Slim Aarons: Women Reveals Intimate Portraits of Jackie

Though he was a genuine companion to the likes of Katharine Hepburn and James Stewart, his way of life was much more modest. The rich, as F Scott Fitzgerald famously noted, “are different from you and me”, but, as Aarons’s photographs attest, they now also seem very different from what they once were: less elegant, certainly, their excesses more in tune with our brash, narcissistic culture. Through the 1970s and ’80s, however, advertising and consumer culture evoked a desire among members of virtually every stratum of society to be able to attain the privileges and trappings of the kind depicted through Slim’s lens: luxury goods, midcentury modern furnishings, smart-caszh wardrobes.

In her fascinating first-hand introduction to the book, Hawk posits Aarons as a pioneer of the “environmental portrait”, wherein the setting is as important in its telling details as the subject. Unable to compete in the 1940 Olympic Games because of the war, she joined Billy Rose’s Aquacade in San Francisco, where she swam with Tarzan star Johnny Weissmuller—a five-time Olympic gold medallist himself – and caught the attention of MGM scouts. Given the changing state of celebrity and society today (three words: social media stars), Aarons’s work is more important than ever, explains Hawk. The book presents the women who most influenced Aarons’s life and work—and the other remarkable personalities he photographed along the way, including Audrey Hepburn, Jackie Kennedy, Diana Vreeland, and Marilyn Monroe, all featured in unforgettable photographs. He worked without strobes or flashes (“I prefer available light,” he said) or photo assistants (he lugged and loaded his own cameras).