Aarons served for three years as a combat photographer for Yank
magazine. From North Africa to the Middle East and Europe, he
recorded the siege of Monte Cassino in Italy, was wounded during
the invasion of Anzio and witnessed Rome
fall to the Allies. His now famous shot of an American soldier
holding a baby in font of joyful crowds massing in the streets
became the cover of Yank in July 1944. After leaving the army, Slim
became a freelance photojournalist. He vowed he’d never photograph
death or destruction again: “I’d wandered through enough
concentration camps and bombed-out villages. I’d slept in the mud
and been shot at. I owed myself some easy, luxurious living. I
wanted to be on the sunny side of the street.”

Slim photographed Hollywood’s elite – everyone from Humphrey
Bogart and Lauren Bacall to Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh have beamed
at his lense and been captured on his roll – and travelled
constantly between
California and New
York (where he covered Broadway openings). When Life magazine
opened a bureau in Rome, Slim relocated to capture a more
international array of celebrities and aristocrats who frequented
the Eternal City. The rest is photogenic history. When Life later
asked him to relocate to Korea to cover the war there, he said no.
His view was now to only photograph “attractive people in
attractive places doing attractive things.”

Clicking away with his small Leica, Slim extracted everything
that was cool and chic about old money – think skiing picnics at
Snowmass Village, Colorado and al-fresco lunch parties in
Palm Springs. Aarons introduced the world to all sorts of
gorgeous locales with his pictures, captured predominantly with a
Leica (although he used a Nikon later in his career). Yet when
asked by his contemporaries about his preferred image-maker he
would tell them to buy a Brownie – a simple and inexpensive camera
made by Kodak and often used for taking snapshots.

Around the period his first book of photographs, A Wonderful
Time (originally published in 1974 – it fell flat), was being
rediscovered Aarons decided to sell his archive. He believed
“society as such didn’t exist anymore” and he wanted the public to
see how he had documented it. Following the successful
republication of his first book, Aarons would go on to publish two
additional tomes – A Place in the Sun (2005) and Once Upon a Time
(2014). Three decades on, A Wonderful Time has become a collectors
item, and copies of it have sold for $2,000 at auction.