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For
six decades legendary photographer Slim Aarons presented
the goings-on in the lives of the rich and privileged to
the readers of such magazines as Holiday, Life, Harper’s
Bazaar and Travel & Leisure, making a career –
in his words – of “photographing attractive
people who were doing attractive things in attractive places.”
In the lavishly illustrated new collection of his pictures
Slim Aarons: A Place in the Sun (Abrams, December
2005, $75), the reader gets a glimpse of the glamorous world
of the beautiful people at play. Among the highlights of
the 210 full-color photos are memorable portraits of C.Z.
Guest at a family seaside villa in Palm Beach (see previous
spread), Kirk Douglas water-skiing off Antibes, Blaine Trump
at Cap Ferrat, John D. Rockefeller III at his farm at Sleepy
Hollow, Westchester, and the Aga Khan at Costa Smeralda.
As editor Christopher Sweet writes in the book’s introduction,
Aarons captured “a kind of golden age of wealth, beauty
and leisure that occurred alongside the rest of what was
going on in the second half of the twentieth century and
yet remained apart, separate, indeed golden.” |
| First
image : C.Z. Guest reclines on a garden chair beside the Grecian
Temple pool at her mother-in-law’s oceanfront estate,
Villa Artemis, Palm Beach, circa 1955. Second image: The Barrett
family takes its 1933 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost to the desert
for a picnic, 1973. Third image: Viscount and Viscountess
Paul de Rosiere with their son, Roland, at Pat and Vere Harmsworth’s
villa in Monte Carlo, 1976. The villa once belonged to Greta
Garbo. |
