Image: © Slim Aarons / Getty Images. Courtesy Ithaca Gallery
Ithaca Gallery is presenting 'Slim Aarons: A Wonderful Time', a seven-work selection of the photographer's images of postwar leisure, from 1 to 31 August 2026. The gallery lists the show as online only, with all works offered at price on request.
Aarons was born in New York City in 1916 and died in 2006. The gallery's account stresses his war record before his society career: he served as a combat photographer in the Second World War and was awarded a Purple Heart, returning with the ambition he later summed up as photographing “attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places”.
On assignment for Holiday, Life and Town & Country he followed the postwar leisure class at play, working beside the pools of Palm Springs, on terraces above the Mediterranean and inside the villas of the international set. The gallery is explicit that the results are not candid or stolen images but composed environmental portraiture, sun-drenched and quietly aspirational, which treated glamour as a serious subject.
Two images anchor his reputation, neither of them in this selection: Poolside Gossip, made in Palm Springs in 1970, and Kings of Hollywood, the 1957 New Year's Eve portrait of Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Van Heflin and James Stewart.
The seven works on view are 'Yacht Holiday' (1967), 'Poolside Glamour' (1970), 'Poolside Backgammon' (1972), 'Social Call' (1972), 'Speedboat Landing' (1973), 'Sunbathing in Antibes' (1976) and 'Conca dei Marini' (1984). The titles trace the coastal settings, private gatherings and travel scenes that recur across his practice.
Ithaca describes itself as a specialist gallery and advisory in twentieth- and twenty-first-century photography and fine art, and directs enquiries about the Aarons works to its advisors. All the photographs are credited © Slim Aarons / Getty Images.
