Summering Through Two Lenses: Slim Aarons vs Martin Parr

Martin Parr

“Summering”— which, unlike simply going on holiday, insists on being a lifestyle, is about as obnoxious as a noun-turned-verb can get.

And yet, this Martin Parr photograph somehow nails the season: a woman in blue goggles, sunbathing with the slack-jawed grace of someone who’s lost all sense of time, space, or SPF. It’s perfect.

Because if summer is anything, it’s theatrical, a ritual of personal rebranding. I, for one, emptied an entire bottle of lightening chamomile lotion onto my hair in an attempt to become the kind of person who casually bleaches on holiday (see: off-duty models, gay designers, and now—apparently—Kate Middleton). Summer is the time to become someone, ideally under golden-hour lighting. Which, as we’re about to see, only one of these two photographers had any interest in offering.

Summer is one peculiar place of body and mind. Human free will suddenly takes infinitely intriguing—often questionable—shapes. What do people choose to do when they have nothing to do? What do they look like while doing it?

The two photographers who most famously captured the antipodes of leisure are Slim Aarons and Martin Parr.

Slim Aarons spent decades photographing people who didn’t sweat.
Martin Parr spent equal time chasing trueness—comfortably beyond (un)flattery.

People without pores

George “Slim” Aarons was a combat photographer for the US Army during World War II, until he decided to turn to the “sunny side of the street”—as he defined it—and began photographing “attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places.” Think Stepford wives in a Pucci dream.

Aarons delivers impressions from a land of annoyingly symmetrical facial features and linen that stays mysteriously wrinkle-free. A friend and Hollywood Golden Age photographer once reportedly told him that “Glamour is essential” and “illusion must be maintained.” It’s safe to say Aarons wasn’t one to ignore good advice. He gave us the Good Life—and on steroids.

Loose Stepford Wives references aside, Aarons clearly adored women. His portraits of female socialites around the world are not just glamorous, but reverent and mythological.

Aarons worked almost exclusively with natural light, often shooting on medium format film to achieve that soft, crisp elegance. His scenes were curated but never too obviously staged—pastel tones, pristine architecture, and sculpted compositions worked in unison to make summer look like an entire personality. Distance was his trick: flattering, editorial, and just far enough to keep the fantasy alive.

Sunburn and all

Martin Parr, born in Surrey in 1952, emerged as one of Britain's most important photographers by documenting the country’s leisure culture with ruthless detail and humour. Where Aarons perfected the fantasy, Martin Parr showed up with a mischievous camera and dragged leisure back into a reality check—with sweat, crumbling chips, sunburn, and the kind of angles you'd untag yourself from on Facebook if it was 2010.

Martin Parr’s photography is built on confrontation. He often shoots with wide-angle lenses that exaggerate whatever's nearest to the camera, pushing faces and details right up into your business. The result is that perspective gets skewed, space feels compressed, and there’s nowhere polite to look. Depth is sacrificed for immediacy, which is exactly the point.

He borrows the visual language of commercial photography—brightness, punchiness, pop—to make you see what you'd usually ignore. It’s documentary with a mischievous eye: honest, ironic, and always a little too close. (My personal nightmare, if you ask.)

His seaside shots, which are often staged in run-down resorts, are alive with awkward contrast: faded deck chairs against neon swimsuits, domestic tenderness framed by the shabbiness of public space. They’re tacky. They’re brilliant. And they’re surely more real than any holiday dump on Instagram.

His work celebrates the working class, even when it makes people uncomfortable. And it has, during his 1980s Serpentine London show — Parr was accused by some of mocking his subjects. But to him, documenting Britain’s leisure culture wasn’t about cruelty. It was about honesty, because “Most images we see are propaganda,” and his just aren’t.