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Laura Aguilar


Laura Aguilar (born 1959) is an American photographer. Her work focuses on the experiences of often marginalized people such as black women, lesbians, and the obese, as well as the perception of her own body.

Aguilar is the daughter of a first-generation Mexican-American father, while her mother is of mixed Mexican and Irish heritage. She has auditory dyslexia and developed an early interest in photography as a medium. She attended Shurr High School in Montebello, California where she met Gil Cuadros, a Mexican-American poet who was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987. Both Aguilar and Cuadros met in a photography class. Cuadros would accompany Aguilar to Downtown Los Angeles for pictures.

Aguilar has been active as a photographer since the 1980s. She is 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 works primarily in the genre of portraiture. Her work centers on the human form and challenges contemporary social constructs of beauty, focusing on Latina lesbians, black people, and the obese. She often uses self-portraiture to come to terms with her own body as she challenges societal norms of sexuality, class, gender, and race. In her series Stillness (1996–99), Motion (1999) and Center (2001), she fuses portraiture with the genres of landscape and still life. Aguilar says that her artistic goal is "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."

Critics and scholars closely identify Aguilar's work with Chicana feminism; one writer observes that "Aguilar consciously moves away from the societally normative images of Chicana female bodies and disassociates them from male-centered nostalgia or idealizations." Chon A. Noriega, director of the Chicano Studies Research Center at University of California, Los Angeles, notes that Aguilar is unusual for the way she "collaborates with subjects who are her peers so that her works is not about power differentials between photographer and subject as is often, if implicitly the case with ... the social documentary tradition itself." Her more recent self-portraits navigate her personal intersection of identities as Latina, lesbian, dyslexic, and obese. Her best known series is Latina Lesbians, (1986–89) which she started in order to help show a positive image of Latina lesbians for a mental health conference. Her other popular works include Clothed/Unclothed (1990–94), Plush Pony (1992), and Grounded (2006–07), with the latter being her first body of work done in color. Her work has drawn the attention of many, reviewer A. M. Rousseau notes, "[Aguilar] makes public what is most private. By this risky act she transgresses familiar images of representation of the human body and replaces stereotypes with images of self-definition. She reclaims her body for herself."


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