Laura Aguilar is a self-taught photographer born in 1959 to a Mexican American father and a mother of Mexican and Irish descent in San Gabriel, California. One of her main goals within her photography is to try to provide a better understanding of a community that she herself belongs to and has remained invisible in the arts. As a heavyweight, lesbian Latina with auditory dyslexia she strives to challenge art and its social patriarchal constructs of the ideal and “beautiful” female body. She is able to do so  by artistically creating photographic images that compassionately render the human experience, revealed through the lives of individuals in the lesbian/gay and/or persons of color communities that are not often considered mainstream.
The human figure is central to her artwork and more prominently the female body. Laura fuses female bodies with landscapes in nature, making the body become one with its surroundings. Self-portraiture is also recurrent and pivotal in further helping her reach her goal, serving as a means for her to become more self-accepting of her own body. Laura uses her body to provide a voice for her loneliness and the marginalized peoples that are outcasted by society. She wants her art to make viewers think about and challenge the social norms of: race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Living within the Los Angeles region Laura Aguilar feels that the LGBT community that surrounds her, full of people of color is a hidden subculture that needs to be seen, and wants to do her part to help .I was drawn to researching her and her art because there was a time when I had a slight obsession with photography in high school and I really wanted to research a photographer who's work made me think. Laura’s  work is unique and I appreciate that her images provide an opportunity for Lesbian Latinas to share their stories openly. I also admire her will to empowering others through her artwork in hoping to provide the opportunity to for the Latina lesbians to explore themselves and others, and to express their own beauty, strength and dignity.

Through her work, Laura Aguilar strives to provide a better understanding of what it is like to be Latina and Lesbian and in this triptych from 1990,Three Eagles Flying she does just that. The iconic photograph is a self portrait addressing her identity through nationality, race and sexuality. Laura stands in the middle bound in ropes as the American flag hangs to her left and the Mexican to her right portraying a lack of connection between Mexico and the Unites states. This creation reflects a very personal standpoint from her memories of growing up and feeling a lack of belonging to either of the two nations. Three Eagles Flying intersects the human body, land, space, and nationality. The three eagles depicted in the artwork are: the Mexican eagle, the American Eagle, and the Chicana lesbian artist. Laura Aguilar is bound by her roots, not completely belonging to either the Mexican or the American she is shackled by her identity.

This image is again another self-portrait of Laura Aguilar. She places herself in a landscape in which she becomes one with nature. Instead of the traditional pose of the female body reclining, she positions herself in a manner that allows her to blend in with her surroundings. Her body becomes the mountains that border the lake before her and reflect her image. Laura continuously challenges social norm's perception of beauty as an obese, dyslexic, Latina lesbian photographer and refuses to conform in her artwork as is shown here. In this work she represents her body as a landscape, almost as a sculpture, and shows her courage to embrace her body despite what others may think finding comfort in the touch of nature.

Challenging society’s expectations of female beauty Laura Aguilar celebrates her large, Chicana lesbian body in about ninety percent of her artwork, In Sandy’s Room (1989) being one of them. In this photograph Laura exhibits her large nude body in the comfort of a homy room reclining in a chair in front of a fan and open window. Laura puts her insecurities aside and challenges herself to welcome the acceptance of her own body. Her body language reveals that she is relaxed and the window represents her fearlessness to raise awareness and bring her large, lesbian Latina community out into the open public.

I am a third year undergraduate student at UCLA studying Spanish who loves to dance and explore culture through art, food, literature and music. I currently volunteer my time in the Pediatric Hematology-Oncology department at the Geffen School of Medicine researching late effects of childhood cancer, access to care, quality of life, and survivorship of long term childhood cancer survivors. After earning my BA I hope to take some time off before applying to a post bacc to eventually make my way to Medical School. I'm a passionate servant leader and want to help decrease the disparities within the medical field in under represented communities.
My interest in the LGBT community was sparked a few years ago by curiosity and I was further intrigued after attending Western Regionals Conference in 2010. Since then I have continued to seek means through which I can keep myself aware and spread the knowledge that little by little I have gained.