Each year, come this season, a certain Slim Aarons photo makes the rounds on Instagram. It features a bathing beauty floating in a pool, bobbing alongside metallic holiday ornaments. Behind her, three children play with the floating, shining orbs. And because it’s not Slim Aarons unless there’s an element of lavish frivolity, a Christmas tree emerges from the water, festooned with swags of aluminum-foil-colored tinsel and metallic bows. The tree is inexplicably anchored to the bottom of the pool, and at the highest point of the tree is a Christmas star, glinting in the California sun. Off in the distance is the Hollywood sign. It’s titled “Christmas Swim.”
“The other day I was on Instagram and saw a comment saying, ‘That’s not Katy Perry. That’s Rita Aarons!’” says Mary Aarons, daughter of Rita (the subject of “Christmas Swim”) and Slim. “I shared the mix-up with my mother. She’s 90 years old and she’s with it, but she has zero social media knowledge and understanding. She always asks where am I seeing all this and who are these people who know about it. And I tell her, ‘You are sort of like an Instagram star.’”
Instagram is a funny place, a platform for anonymous individuals to launch themselves into the public eye and for the already famous to maintain their renown. On the gram, you get what you give, and so it’s peculiar for the app to have had such an impact on a nonuser. Slim wasn’t alive to see the invention of Instagram, and he doesn’t have an estate managing an official account, and yet Instagram has played a significant role in his legacy. Through Instagram, Slim’s photos are distributed, circulated, and double-tapped by users all over the world. Your next Slim Aarons photo is likely just a few scrolls away.
Born as George Allen Aarons in 1916 in New York City (his six-foot-four frame and lanky build earned him the nickname Slim), he started fiddling around with a camera while enlisted in the United States Army. He worked as a photographer at West Point military academy and later as a combat photographer following and documenting the horrors of the war across Northern Africa and Europe. After the war, Slim vowed to walk on the sunnier side of the street, opting to photograph girls not guns, bikinis instead of bombs. As to what caught his eye and what he would deem worthy subject matter, Slim famously said it best himself: “Attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places.”