[1] She was mostly self-taught, although she took some photography courses at East Los Angeles College, where her second solo exhibition, Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell, was held.
Often using her naked body as a subject, she used photography to empower herself and her inner struggles to reclaim her own identity as "Laura" – a lesbian, fat, disabled, and brown person.
Her work centers on the human form[1] and challenges contemporary social constructs of beauty, focusing upon Latina lesbians, black people, and the fat.
[1] Aguilar stated that her artistic goal was "to create photographic images that compassionately render the human experience, revealed through the lives of individuals in the lesbian/gay and/or persons of color communities.
[18] She had her first retrospective at the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College as part of the Pacific Standard Time LA/LA series of exhibitions in 2017–18.
Body a comprehensive group exhibition narrating stories about Chicago experience and art histories, spanning works from the 1960s to the present day and showcasing a myriad of artistic languages.
[22][23] Aguilar died of complications from diabetes in a Long Beach, California nursing home, Colonial Care Center, at the age of 58.
Some of her most notable pieces such as Nature Self-Portraits, Grounded, and Center "fuse" female bodies into desert landscapes as "an integral part of [the] ecosystem".
Scholars contend that Aguilar "challenges the idea of the female nude-one of the most important genres in western art" by using atypical bodies.
Curator Pilar Thompkins Rivas reflected on the relationship between Aguilar and the outdoors stating "feeling the sun on her body was important to her...because she did noy get a lot of touch in her life".
Aguilar set up in the East Los Angeles lesbian bar called The Plush Pony and took photographs of the patrons creating a series of black and white portraits of the lower working class community.
[13][44] Aguilar turned the camera on herself after documenting the community she found herself in- the queer Latinx scene in East Los Angeles.
It was the early 1990s when Aguilar alone took black and white portraits at a "lesbian bar in the Los Angeles Neighborhood of El Sereno" called the Plush Pony.
[45] The series was created in a "built in studio" in the bar showcasing a "range of butch/femme couples, gay men, gender-queer bodies, and combinations thereof" that made up the queer and immigrant community of Los Angeles.
From this perspective, Aguilar captures the varying compositions of "pleasure, community and friendship" though the lens of gender, race, sexuality, and class.