Slim Aarons: La Dolce Vita

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• Publisher: Abrams
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781419700606
• eBook ISBN:
  9781613122167
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Photography

It was in postwar Rome that Slim Aarons realized his
professional mission in life: to photograph, in his now
famous phrase, “attractive people who were doing attractive
things in attractive places.” The photographer had survived
World War II, witnessing the fall of Tobruk, the Anzio
invasion, and the liberation of Rome, and had come
away from it with a distinct aversion to war, a career as
a photojournalist, and a passion for Italy. After leaving
the army for a brief stint in Hollywood, he relocated to
Rome when Life magazine opened a bureau there. In
those luminous late 1940s, when Rome and the world
were coming back to life, Slim Aarons discovered his great
subject: the cavalcade of high society and aristocracy
and celebrity—and the settings where this special class
of people displayed themselves to best effect. The Beautiful
People who flocked to Rome in those years would become
Slim Aarons’s principal subjects for the next fifty years. Italy
too would be an enduring theme, as he would return year
in and year out to photograph the aristocracy, the cultural
elite, and the international jet set who found sanctuary
in the country’s most beautiful places. And when in Rome,
he would always take the same room at the Excelsior Hotel
as he had when he lived there in the 1940s.

Tracing a journey from the 1940s to the 1990s, this lavish
fourth volume in Abrams’s Slim Aarons collection revels
in this photographer’s love affair with Italy—its magnificent
cities and towns and landscapes, its fashionable resorts, the
pleasures of the Italian art of living—and offers a glimpse
into the lives of its preeminent families in formal and
informal circumstances, photographed in their palaces
and on their estates, at their vacation villas and in other
favorite haunts. The images collected in this book paint
the cultural geography of fifty years in Italy and distill one
photographer’s vision of la dolce vita. The introduction
by Christopher Sweet shares stories from Aarons’s years
in Italy and new insights about his life and career.

SLIM AARONS ♦ LA DOLCE VITA

SLIM AARONS ♦ LA DOLCE VITA

CHRISTOPHER SWEET

Getty Images
Abrams, New York

AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
At Getty Images, New York: Eric Rachlis, Michelle Graham, and Jodi Einhorn
At Getty Images, London: Sarah McDonald, Matthew Butson, Luigi Di Dio, Dan Hawkins, and Rich Davies
At Abrams: Steve Tager, Andrea Danese, Scott Auerbach,...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Back Cover