Sunbathing on Capri, 1980

Hotel Punta Tragara

The Hotel Punta Tragara stands on the south-eastern side of Capri, on the rocks above the Faraglioni: the three stacks rising from the sea that form the island's best-known view. The building began as a villa whose design is attributed to Le Corbusier. Later it became a hotel.

It is exactly the kind of place where Aarons was at home: not a ballroom or a party, but a terrace in the sun, with guests who have nowhere else to be.

Who is in the photograph

According to the archive caption, Catherine Wilke joins the hotel's sunbathing guests here, some of whom are sunbathing topless. The caption tells us nothing more about her, and nothing more is needed: this is not a portrait, but an afternoon.

Aarons described his work as photographing attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places.

Capri in 1980

By the time Aarons took this photograph, he had been photographing the leisure of the international elite for more than twenty years, and Italy kept returning in that work. This image belongs to his later years. A very different Italian coast appears in Hotel Il Pellicano, taken in 1973 in Porto Ercole, Tuscany.

On the wall

Sunbathing on Capri is a portrait image. That means it fits where a wide work will not: a narrower wall, an alcove, beside a cabinet or in a hallway. Hang it next to a second Italian picture and you have a small wall full of the Mediterranean.