Slim Aarons photographed American wealth for magazines—Holiday, Town & Country, Harper’s Bazaar, Life, Vogue, Travel & Leisure—in the decades after the Second World War. A Wonderful Time: An Intimate Portrait of the Good Life, published by Harper & Row in 1975, gathers the best of that work, including pictures that had not appeared in print, and sets them beside his own account of the assignments that produced them.

What emerges is not a critique of privilege but a portrait of it from within. Aarons moves from coast to coast and on to Bermuda, the Caribbean and Acapulco, recording estates, swimming pools, croquet lawns, ranches and boats, and naming families such as the Cushings of Newport, the Fords of Grosse Pointe and the Rockefellers of New York. He writes as a working photographer who liked his subjects and was liked in return, which is why the pictures can be at once flattering and precise.

The book’s importance lies in that combination. Magazines had carried these images one at a time; the volume gives them sequence, pace and a social panorama, and it treats commissioned pictures as a body of work rather than disposable pages. The hardcover runs to 250 pages, with Aarons’s narrative running alongside the photographs. Later photographers who made leisure and money their subject worked in a field he had already mapped, though not always with his lightness.

Cataloguing dates the book to 1975, while some bookseller records give 1974. Harper & Row issued it in hardcover, and the volume is now out of print; copies appear at auction houses, including Swann Galleries and Doyle New York, which suggests that demand has not faded. For a collector, its value is documentary: the fullest gathering Aarons himself assembled of a project that shaped how mid-century American privilege was pictured for print.