Laura Aguilar

Laura Aguilar (October 26, 1959 – April 25, 2018) was an American photographer.

She was born with auditory dyslexia and attributed her start in photography to her brother, who showed her how to develop in dark rooms.

She was mostly self-taught, although she took some photography courses at East Los Angeles College, where her second solo exhibition, Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell, was held.

Aguilar used visual art to bring forth marginalized identities, especially within the LA Queer scene and Latinx communities.

Before the term Intersectionality was used commonly, Aguilar captured the largely invisible identities of large bodied, queer, working-class, brown people in the form of portraits.

Often using her naked body as a subject, she used photography to empower herself and her inner struggles to reclaim her own identity as “Laura”- a lesbian, fat, disabled, and brown person.

Although work on Chicana/os is limited, Aguilar has become an essential figure in Chicano art history and is often regarded as an early "pioneer of intersectional feminism” for her outright and uncensored work. Some of her most well-known works are Three Eagles Flying, The Plush Pony Series, and Nature Self Portraits. Aguilar has been noted for her collaboration with cultural scholars such as Yvonne Yarbo-Berjano and receiving inspiration from other artists like Judy Dater. She was well known for her portraits, mostly of herself, and also focused upon people in marginalized communities, including LGBT and Latino subjects, self-love, and social stigma of obesity.

Aguilar was the daughter of a first-generation Mexican-American father.

Her mother is of mixed Mexican and Irish heritage.

She had auditory dyslexia and developed an early interest in photography as a medium.

She attended Schurr High School in Montebello, California.

Aguilar was active as a photographer beginning in the 1980s.

She was mainly self-taught, although she studied for a time at East Los Angeles Community College and participated in The Friends of Photography Workshop and Santa Fe Photographic Workshop.

Aguilar worked primarily in the genre of portraiture.

Her work centers on the human form and challenges contemporary social constructs of beauty, focusing upon Latina lesbians, black people, and the fat.

According to critics, she often used self-portraiture to come to terms with her own body as she challenged societal norms of sexuality, class, gender, and race.

In 1987, during a high school photography class, she met Gil Cuadros, a Mexican-American poet who was diagnosed with AIDS.

Cuadros would accompany Aguilar to Downtown Los Angeles for pictures.

Aguilar's works have appeared in more than 50 national and international exhibitions, including the 1993 Venice Biennial, Italy; the Los Angeles City Hall Bridge Gallery, the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), the Los Angeles Photography Center, the Women's Center Gallery at the University of California in Santa Barbara, and Artpace's exhibit Visibilities: Intrepid Women of Artpace.

In her series Stillness (1996–99), Motion (1999) and Center (2001), she, according to critics, fused portraiture with the genres of landscape and still life.

Aguilar stated that her artistic goal was "to create photographic images that compassionately render the human experience, revealed through the lives of individuals in the lesbian/gay and/or persons of color communities."

In 1996, Aguilar and fellow photographer, Delilah Montoya created the series of nudes in nature titled Nature Self-Portraits “on a road trip through New Mexico” where Aguilar found herself pushing the boundaries of her art.

Not only were the subject's nude, but they were large-bodied and brown- bodies that art historians state “would have never been included in modernists photography”.

Subjects reflected the shape of rocks, trees, and water making their body a part of the land.

Through the “projection of her body”, Aguilar forces viewers to acknowledge her and rejects the “parameters of what is accepted as…normal, appealing”, and “attractive”.

By placing herself out front in nature, the viewer is asked to see her body for its beauty outside of conventional standards.

Scholars contend that Aguilar “challenges the idea of the female nude-one of the most important genres in western art” by using atypical bodies.

The desert, specifically the San Gabriel Valley, represented a homeland for Aguilar stating, “My mom grew up here…my grandmother grew up here, This was my playground”.

Aguilar's self-acceptance in nature came from her sense of connection to the land.

Curator Pilar Thompkins Rivas reflected on the relationship between Aguilar and the outdoors stating “feeling the sun on her body was important to her…because she did noy get a lot of touch in her life”.

This interaction between subject and landscape opens up different context and “new subjectivity” for Chicana/os to be represented in.

She was a 2000 recipient of an Anonymous Was A Woman Award and the James D. Phelan Award in photography in 1995.

She had her first retrospective at the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College as part of the Pacific Standard Time LA/LA series of exhibitions in 2017–18.

The exhibition also made stops in Miami, FL at the Frost Art Museum and the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, IL.

It opened at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York in spring 2021.

Aguilar died of complications from diabetes in a Long Beach, California nursing home, Colonial Care Center, at the age of 58.

Her work is held in a number of public collections, including those at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, Indiana University, Bloomington; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City.

Nudes and Self Portraits Much of Aguilar's work is self-portraiture in the nude, these series include Stillness, Window (Nikki on My Mind), Motion , Grounded, Center and Nature Self-Portraits

Much of Aguilar's work uses the nude female form being blended into different landscapes.

Some of her most notable pieces such as Nature Self-Portraits, Grounded, and Center “fuse” female bodies into desert landscapes as “an integral part of [the] ecosystem”.