Nature Self Portrait #7

Although she created work based on her identity, Laura Aguilar felt strongly that her photographs were not strictly self-portraits but rather challenges to prevailing ideologies. Her Nature Self-Portraits, begun in the mid-1990s, present the artist’s own nude body amid the rocky landscape of Southern California’s Inland Empire. Aguilar’s work questions notions of beauty, the tradition of the female body being likened to a landscape, the absence of Brown and big bodies in art, and the nationalist traditions embedded in the American landscape.