Marietine Birnie, Blue Lagoon

Marietine Birnie, Blue Lagoon — Slim Aarons. Comino, Malta, July 1959. Framed in a deep square mount close to a metre wide. The dining area.

Comino, July 1959. A woman comes out of the shallows of the Blue Lagoon holding a snorkelling mask and fins. Beside her is a luzzu, the traditional Maltese fishing boat, painted blue, red and yellow, with the Eye of Osiris on the bow to keep the crew safe. Above her, a red-and-white striped parasol.

The photographer

Slim Aarons spent the 1950s and 60s photographing people at leisure in Capri, St Moritz, Palm Beach and along the Riviera, and described his subject as attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places. He had been a combat photographer before that, which is usually offered as the explanation for why he spent the rest of his life pointing a camera at the opposite.

What matters to us is that he came to Malta at all. In 1959 the islands were still a British territory and not yet on anyone’s list of glamorous destinations. Aarons photographed here anyway, at the Blue Lagoon and at the Inland Sea in Gozo, and in doing so quietly filed Malta alongside the Amalfi Coast in the visual record of where well-off people went.

The subject, and the boat

Almost nothing is known about Marietine Birnie beyond her appearing in several frames that summer. The anonymity helps. She is not a celebrity being photographed; she is somebody who has just been swimming, holding the evidence.

The print hangs in the dining area, framed in a deep square mount close to a metre wide. It is the largest piece in the building and the one that does the most work, because a dining table wants something to look at that does not demand a response. Guests eat under it, take calls under it, and eventually ask about the boat.

The luzzu is the part worth knowing. Its shape traces back to Phoenician hulls, the colours are traditional rather than decorative, and the painted eye is still there on working boats in Marsaxlokk today, at the other end of the island.