Laura Aguilar

Biography

Laura Aguilar was born in San Gabriel, California, in 1959 and died at the age of 58 on April 25, 2018, in Long Beach, California. As a queer woman of Mexican-American descent, she devoted her photography to Chicana women and, above all, to the queer community around her. Her 1980s portrait series "Latina Lesbians" consists of dignified, lovingly staged photographic portraits of lesbian Latina women, which she paired with texts handwritten by the women themselves in order to tell a story. Through this work, Aguilar hoped to break down prejudice against the Chicana community.

The beginnings of her artistic career and her passion for photography go back to her childhood. Her brother first showed her the family darkroom and the developing process, sparking his sister's interest in art. Aguilar, who had auditory dyslexia, was largely self-taught. Although she took photography classes at East Los Angeles College for a time, she developed her artistic approach and position entirely on her own. Laura Aguilar's work has been shown in more than 50 exhibitions in the United States and abroad. An early highlight was her participation in the Venice Biennale in 1993. This was followed by exhibitions at the Los Angeles City Hall Bridge Gallery and The Women's Center Gallery at the University of California, among others. Her first retrospective, "Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell," took place in 2017 as part of the Getty Foundation's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative.

Today, Laura Aguilar's work is often described in terms of intersectional feminism. The artist herself rejected this label. Rather, she wanted to distance herself explicitly from the views of stereotypical white feminism, which focuses on the advancement, experiences and privileges of already privileged white cis women. Instead, Aguilar sought to draw attention to the diversity of women's identities and experiences. For Aguilar, her works were a depiction of her own reality. Her approach is deeply connected to her own experiences as a working-class, queer, Chicana woman and as a person who did not conform to conventional beauty standards. She was aware of the power and provocative impact of her images. She wanted viewers to see her work as an attempt to find freedom within oneself. From the mid-1990s onward, Aguilar photographed herself nude in the desert and in the landscapes of the American Southwest. This resulted in series such as "Nature Self-Portraits," "Stillness," "Motion" and "Grounded." In these images, her body merges with rock and earth; she often lies curled up among stones whose shapes resemble her own. These works form a radical counterpoint to traditional nude photography and landscape photography.

The 1996 series "Nature Self-Portrait" marks a turning point in Laura Aguilar's work: for the first time, she moved her nude self-portraits from indoor spaces out into nature. Created during a period of depression while she was traveling through New Mexico, these photographs opened up a new artistic approach for her, and Aguilar experienced working in nature as healing in itself.