Photographer Laura Aguilar’s work confronts and makes visible the different ways we see ourselves and the ways others see us, acknowledging identity’s hard edges and muddled intersections. Born in San Gabriel, California, Aguilar herself embodied, and at times wrestled with, many identities, including artist, woman, Chicano/a, queer, lesbian, Mexican, American, and dyslexic, among others. The artist saw photography as “the only way I could express myself,” and making portraits, whether of herself or of others, was a road to understanding who she was.
Aguilar studied photography at East Los Angeles College in the late 1970s into the ’80s, and began using her camera to document the people around her in LA by staging their portraits. The ’80s series Plush Pony, for example, documented the patrons of a working-class lesbian bar in the neighborhood of El Sereno, east of downtown Los Angeles. Aguilar’s interest in representing those around her and those in whom she saw parts of herself challenged traditional ideas about documentary photography being “objective.” After exhibiting the series, Aguilar wondered, “...How could I photograph my own community? White people go into other people’s communities and photograph them and document them and educate them to themselves.” In contrast to this model, Aguilar often collaborated with her sitters, and in her Latina Lesbians series she even offered them a chance to add handwritten captions. “I wanted people to write about how they see themselves and where they’re coming [from],” Aguilar later explained.
Aguilar also turned the camera on herself, creating self-portraits that explored different aspects of her identity. A self-portrait of Aguilar standing and smiling in a casual indoor setting is included in the Latina Lesbians series, on which Aguilar writes “I’m not comfortable with the word Lesbian but as each day go’s by I’m more and more comfortable with the word LAURA.” In Three Eagles Flying (1990), by contrast, Aguilar is obscured, her head wrapped in a Mexican flag and the lower half of her body in an American flag, with her breasts exposed and a thick rope looped around her neck and waist. This poignant image conveys the friction of Aguilar’s Mexican and American identities.
At other times, the artist deploys text and image as a means of expressing institutional critique. Access + Opportunity = Success (1993) is composed of five individual photographs in which the artist holds handwritten cardboard signs that state the equation referenced in the title. By posing with the signs and enshrining the definitions of these terms as art, the artist foregrounds the issues of access and opportunity in the art world, which arts institutions historically denied to queer, disabled, and Latinx artists like Aguilar.
From the ’90s onward, Aguilar became fascinated with the connection between the body and land, creating naked portraits and self-portraits in outdoor settings. Her Grounded series, photographed in Joshua Tree, California, renders a poetic connection between body and earth, imagining the topography of Aguilar’s own body in relation to that of the landscape.
Aguilar’s practice puts forth a model of understanding identity as it is experienced—physical, messy, complicated, joyful, communal, oppressive, and liberating. Her activism and insistence on subjectivity, seriality, and complexity created a new archive of queer, Latinx women in Los Angeles. In the artist’s words, “I’m just me, who is confused on a regular basis. You know, I’m just trying to be honest.”
Rachel Remick, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, 2024
