“I have never seen Aguilars work in person. I did somehow always feel it would leave me blurry eyed with fogged up glasses sniffling in my mask. I have always felt some pull to her. I found her work two days before she died in 2018. I was still in undergrad and in the depths of my current eating disorder. Her body looked like mine, and she photographed it like mine. I never saw her face but i didn’t need to. I felt beauty, hatred, passivity, craving, support. I just understood. I felt like I was seeing myself.
 

Now, many years later, I am sitting in a poorly air-conditioned gallery, on a bench that could be far comfier, surrounded by her self portraits. I did immediately start crying. I hate that the museum refused to use the word fat. To be able to have her body grace these walls and still carry the shame around that word makes me boil.
She is so beautiful.
There is a photo that feels so familiar. It’s one of her (taken by someone else) setting up her camera and tripod with random clothing draped over her and sandals. She’s blocking the sun from the viewfinder to presumably set up a shot. I feel this. There is a silliness to the difference of stillness in her self portraits versus this very technical gesture.

I got turned off by the gallery’s wall text about your work providing visibility of people like us. I can’t help but think you’d be pissed at that like i am. You don’t struggle to be visible, you see yourself every day, the people who love you see you everyday. The Museum is referencing their own blindness. Not even blindness but their choice to look away. 
I do not have words for your pictures. They just feel right. I just understand. 
I have found myself thinking that I wish i could have known you, but i think i found you when i needed to. 
A middle aged white dude just walked through and said to his wife(?) “gotta love yourself” ” 

-- a rambling while sitting in the Laura Aguilar exhibit at XXXXXXXX