Laura Aguilar Is Out There

There is a landscape. It is the desert. Not the sandy desert. Rocks. I see cracks and shapes. I see boulders. One of them is not a boulder. It is a human. A nude human. A nude human with a crack. Hiding right out in the open.

Twenty years ago, Laura Aguilar traveled to Joshua Tree National Park and placed herself, au naturale, among the rocks and scrub. The photographs she brought back became Grounded, her final series of self-portraits in nature, and one of her rare forays into color. She had photographed herself nude outdoors before, notably when she traveled to New Mexico 10 years earlier for her Nature Self-Portrait series. In describing those photos, Stefanie Snider wrote that Aguilar’s body “becomes another irregular rocky formation, both blending into her surroundings and, in her liveness and softness of flesh, standing out.” With the Grounded photos, Aguilar took that simultaneous blending in and standing out to another level.