In 1996, Chicana photographer Laura Aguilar (1959-2018) traveled to New Mexico, funded by a grant from a gallery in Newcastle, England. With her friend and fellow photographer Delilah Montoya, Aguilar explored the landscape, picking her way over the writhing twists of dead branches, the rocks with small pools in their dips. Aguilar would undress at each site, set up her camera, and mimic the shapes she found within the natural world. The camera follows the arch of her back so that it blends with a line of white rock at the edge of a thin strip of water. She lies next to a shallow pool, head resting on an outstretched arm, the weight of her stomach folding to the side and onto the ground, mirrored beneath her. She stands with her back to the camera, holding up her arms just like the crooked, dry branches. A shadow from one curves its way across her puckered bum cheek. The eventual series created from these photographs, her Nature Self-Portraits, would become her most celebrated.
The road trip was an homage of sorts. Aguilar’s close friend, the writer Gil Cuadros, had recently died from AIDS-related illness. Aguilar was part of the LGBTQ+ community, and saw firsthand how homophobia from the Reagan Administration led to an apathetic response to an illness that some considered a punishment from God. In 1987, White House Communications Director Pat Buchanan blamed the AIDS epidemic on the “willful refusal of homosexuals to cease indulging in … immoral, unnatural, unsanitary, unhealthy, and suicidal” sexual practices. Around 2001, Aguilar made Gilbert’s Altar, an assemblage housed within an open suitcase. There’s a smiling Buddha with raised hands, a plastic pig, a gingerbread cookie cutter filled with pills and a syringe, a pair of photographs in a hinged frame of Aguilar and Cuando posing in front of the same Grecian-looking sculpture.
All this is to say that while Aguilar’s photographs of her body in nature are beautiful, they are also a type of reckoning. Nature Self-Portraits was, for Aguilar, a process of self-discovery, a way of—in her words—“learning to be comfortable with who you are.” However, they also sit within a wider practice that attempts to make bodies like hers visible. Bodies that didn’t conform to, or were excluded from, existing visual histories. Bodies that weren’t welcomed into certain landscapes, or that were seen as transgressive and therefore dangerous.
Earlier in the ‘90s, Aguilar was introduced to Plush Pony, a lesbian bar in El Sereno, Los Angeles. It was frequented mainly by working-class Mexican and Chicana women. In her eponymously titled series, women stand in front of a makeshift backdrop. They were uncertain at first, but happier to pose after Aguilar offered to sell them prints for $5. A butch woman with short, slightly quiffed hair stands with her arms crossed in front of her, chin tilted slightly upward and looking directly into the camera with a wry smile, cross dangling low from a chain around her neck. Others pose together, standing close to one another—a woman’s hand tugging at the bottom of her lover’s shirt; a group of three smiling broadly, one of them lifting up her leg and flashing her thigh, calf, and high-heeled foot as it’s held aloft by the other two. “We are present, but remain unseen,” Aguilar wrote about people of color in the queer scene of Los Angeles. Her portraits of Cuadros featured in Gilbert’s Altar show him smiling to her while he washes up; reading into a microphone; posing seductively in front of a window; at an ACT UP rally in Los Angeles; pale and lifeless and lying on a pillow, his eyes rolled back.
Diagnosed with auditory dyslexia at the age of 26, Aguilar found it hard to read, write, and understand words. As she was mainly self-taught, photography became an alternative means of communication. To create became a way to speak, and a way to build something. The landscape holds Aguilar. Her body in her Nature Self-Portraits series is environmentally grounded, given space. The act of taking photographs of the communities she knew was a way for Aguilar to offer this space to others, with care, with tenderness. Aguilar wanted to create “images which allow us the opportunity to share ourselves openly.” The act of being seen becomes a way to counter exclusion, but—in my mind more important—it is an opportunity to be seen by each other, too. Aguilar insisted that her photographs weren’t created for an imagined audience; she made them because she wanted to.
For her last works, Aguilar went back into the landscape. The color photographs from her aptly-titled Grounded (2006-2007) series, taken in Joshua Tree, are playful. In one, she bends down in front of the camera, the groove between her buttocks tracing a line up a sheet of rock with a similar split tracing its surface. On top of this, almost perfectly echoing Aguilar’s own body, is a curved rock, deep yellow against the blue sky. It too is rounded, a slight crease off one side similar to a paunched stomach, its body stippled, and it has the same dimple at the top of its cheeks. In Motion (1999), Aguilar is no longer alone. Other women, friends, models, are naked with her. They lie in a line, bodies cascading over the rocks within what looks like a dry riverbed. Or they lie on the ground, extending themselves to become the roots of a complexly knotted and low-hanging tree. Their faces are turned away from the camera, or covered with their hair. It’s less an act of wanting to be hidden than it is a way to merge with the landscape. A way to go beyond individual identifiers in order to become a part of something bigger.
The term naked—instead of nude—feels appropriate here. “A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude,” writes the critic John Berger, and that feels right when looking at Aguilar’s oeuvre. Her images are so clearly of and for herself and those she was close to. ArtForum notes that, in one of her last interviews, she described her joy in finding large rocks in Joshua Tree, ones that her “body fit in.” A body that is a natural phenomenon, a body that belongs.
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