Week Five: Laura Aguilar

This week, I found that the presentation about Laura Aguilar stood out the most.  She was a self-taught photographer who works mainly with the portrayal of her body and the environment which she is in.  I found this to be rather interesting because it is an expressive form of art which is not as commonly seen.  Aguilar wants to show herself off in a way which would portray her different lifestyle.  She is a Latina and a Lesbian, which constitutes two different minority groups and through her art and photographs, she tries to show the beauty of the female body through a somewhat unorthodox approach.  She is a heavyset woman, but she embraces this and flaunts her body image.

She poses in different locations, fully nude, in order to show her body and how it is accentuated by her surroundings.  Many photographs show Aguilar laying on different landscapes to show the contours of her body compared to the contours of the background.  She aims to break the negative stereotypes that people have about Latinas and Lesbians and show that there is more than one conception of what beauty is, and it isn’t always encapsulated in the beauty of attractive women, but sometimes hidden within and expressed through art.