Born in San Gabriel, California, in 1959, Laura Aguilar was the daughter of a Mexican-American father and a Mexican-Irish mother. As a woman of color, a lesbian, and an auditory dyslexic, Aguilar used photography as an outlet and a way to explore and challenge notions of identity, the female body, and societal assumptions about beauty. She attended Schurr High School in Montebello, California. 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.

Laura Aguilar, *Nature Self-Portrait #14*, 1996, series, black and white photography, © Laura Aguilar Trust of 2016

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 fat bodies. 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 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."

Laura Aguilar, *At Home with the Nortes*, 1990, gelatin silver print, Courtesy the artist and the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.

Aguilar’s work has been exhibited in the 1993 Venice Biennale, as well as at the Los Angeles City Hall Bridge Gallery, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the Smithsonian Institution’s International Gallery in Washington DC, and the International Center of Photography in New York. 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.

Laura Aguilar

Novera Ahmed

Dorothea Lange