Slim Aarons photographed the rich at leisure for Holiday, Town & Country and Life. These are the photographers who share his light and his subjects.
Slim Aarons built a career on what he called “photographing attractive people, doing attractive things, in attractive places”. For Holiday, Town & Country and Life he photographed socialites and celebrities at leisure: by the pool, on the slopes, at the long lunch. His most cited picture, Poolside Gossip, was made in 1970 at Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs.
He died in 2006. In 1997 Mark Getty, a co-founder of Getty Images, had bought his archive, and Getty sells his photographs today. If you love the pictures and want something no one else at the table owns, look at the photographers around him. Four are worth knowing.
Jacques Henri Lartigue.
Born in 1894 to a wealthy family in Courbevoie, on the western edge of Paris, Lartigue started taking photographs at seven. He photographed his family at play, the early motor races and the first aeroplanes, and tennis at the French championships, Suzanne Lenglen among the players. Most of it went unseen until 1963, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him an exhibition. It is the same leisure Aarons photographed, seen from the inside by a boy who belonged to it.
Toni Frissell.
Frissell, born in New York in 1907, knew the families she photographed. She worked for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and was one of the first fashion photographers to leave the studio, setting her pictures outdoors. She photographed golf and sailing for Sports Illustrated, skied for pleasure, and in the Second World War photographed nurses, airmen and soldiers for the Red Cross and the War Department.
Massimo Vitali.
Vitali, born in Como in 1944, turned to fine art photography in 1995. He works from a platform four or five metres high with a large-format camera, so that a whole beach fits the frame and the detail holds across it. His beaches and clubs have been shown at the Centre Pompidou and the Reina Sofía. The subject is Aarons’s, the beach in season; the company is a crowd.
Gray Malin.
Malin, a photographer based in Los Angeles, is known for aerial photographs: beaches seen from above, parasols and swimmers laid out like a pattern. His book Beaches gathers five years of that work across twenty cities on six continents.
The house’s own.
The Good Season’s photographers are not Slim Aarons and are not trying to be. They work in the same light. Emma Tysinger photographs the Côte d’Azur from above: pale beach umbrellas in rows beneath a cliff in The Umbrella Committee, parasols and swimmers below pastel houses in Cliffside Company. On the mountain she finds the pauses: red deckchairs facing the slopes in One More Break, skis left outside a timber hut in Lunch at Altitude.
David Szabo photographs the arrival. In Departure Lounge a red sports car and a private jet share the tarmac beneath the mountains; in Ski Weekend the skis and poles are already on the roof rack. Every photograph is printed to order and framed by hand in the UK.
The Old Money edit.
Riviera beaches, alpine lunches and fast cars, from the house’s own photographers.
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Filed 14 October 2026, under Photography.
