Slim Aarons photographed terraces, yachts and long lunches, but the swimming pool gave him his most concentrated stage. Poolside with Slim Aarons, published by Abrams in 2007 as a 240-page hardcover, arranges that stage across more than a hundred color plates and black-and-white photographs, returning again and again to water, sunlight and the people who built their days around both.

The settings run from the Caribbean to Italy, Mexico and Monaco, and the years covered reach from the 1950s into the 1980s. C. Z. Guest, Lilly Pulitzer, Cheryl Tiegs and Peter Beard appear among the sitters, yet recognition is not really the point. As the book’s own framing suggests, the pool, the architecture around it and the visible details of leisure — summer drinks, swimming and time spent outdoors — carry as much weight as any celebrated face. Aarons worked largely for magazines, and these pictures keep the composure of commissioned work: composed, unhurried, closely attentive to how an affluent summer actually looked.

William Norwich contributes an introduction, and Getty Images supplies the archive from which the photographs are drawn. The book itself is generous — roughly 11 by 14 inches — a scale that lets crowded group scenes and quiet vignettes read with equal clarity.

Poolside follows earlier Abrams volumes of Aarons’s work, and develops a focused theme within his wider photographic work.

For a collector, the appeal lies in the book’s sustained attention to one setting. The swimming pool connects photographs made across several decades and locations, providing a way to compare clothing, architecture, social gathering and the display of wealth. Read together, the pictures offer a distinctive record of how privileged leisure was pictured in the second half of the twentieth century.