Laura Aguilar

Laura Aguilar worked from 1983 until her death in 2018. She was a lesbian Chicana photographer who focused mainly on photographing others in the queer Chicanx community in Los Angeles and later worked on photographic self-portraits. One of her well-known series is the Plush Pony series named after a lesbian bar in the EL Sereno neighborhood of Los Angeles. In this series, Aguilar set up a makeshift studio and photographed patrons of the bar, trading black and white photographs for the sitters’ times. In addition to including various forms of what family means in her work, Aguilar was a major body positivity advocate and struggled with her weight all her life. Aguilar photographed her naked body against desert landscapes in her Nature Self-Portrait series. Because queer bodies do not often fit within the mainstream conception of what “male” and “female” bodies should look like, Aguilar contested these mainstream conceptions with her fat, brown, queer body in the traditional landscape photograph. Through her family and self-portraits, Aguilar centers queerness, humanizes the queer community, and undermines narrow-minded photographic practices.

Stillness #24 by Laura Aguilar, 1999. Image by rocor licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0