Slim Aarons at Altitude

Slim Aarons spent decades photographing wealthy people at leisure—poolside in Palm Springs, yachting in the Aegean, skiing in Gstaad—and what made his pictures endure wasn’t the glamour but the intimacy. His subjects looked comfortable in their wealth in a way that fashion photography rarely captures, less posed than simply observed. You believed they actually lived like that. The camera was a guest, not a commission.

Mario Testino has been working in that territory for years, and a shoot he did in Sölden, Austria, lands somewhere in that tradition. The location helps: a glass-fronted structure perched at the summit of the Gaislachkogl, looking out over the Ötztal Alps, the kind of building that exists entirely to frame the view. Testino photographed Johannes Huebl—originally from Hannover, now a fixture in international fashion with a client list running from Ralph Lauren to Hugo Boss to Dunhill—alongside Shermine Shahrivar, in the specific quality of high-altitude light that makes everyone look like they’ve just arrived and have no intention of leaving.

What Testino understands, and what the best Aarons pictures understood, is that the fantasy of arrival—the sense that you’ve made it somewhere, that the landscape and the company and the moment are all aligned—photographs differently than any other fantasy. It has a stillness to it. The drama is already over. You’re just here now, in this light, with these people, and the mountains don’t care either way.

Huebl carries it well. There’s something in how the camera reads him—a self-possession that doesn’t tip into vanity—that makes sense of why Testino made him the subject of this particular project. He looks like someone who has earned the altitude without needing to announce it.