Paulina Lavista (born 1 November 1945)[1] is a Mexican photographer, noted for her controversial work which has tested the limits of the field.
[citation needed] She is the daughter of a composer and a painter,[1] beginning a career in modeling and cinema before moving into photographic work in the 1960s.
[6][7] Her portrait work included images of Eduardo Mata in an easy chair in his house in Tepoztlán, Francisco Toledo in his studio, Rufino Tamayo in Los Pinos, Graciela Iturbide in the home of Manuel Álvarez Bravo and her father Raúl Lavista at his piano.
[citation needed] Since then her work has been exhibited individually or collectively at the Museo Carrillo Gil, the Foro de Arte Contemporáneo, the Cada del Lago, the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana[5] and the Chopo Museum all in Mexico City as well as at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin .
[6] In 2013, the Centro Cultural Isidro Fabela Museo Casa del Risco in San Ángel, Mexico City held a retrospective of her work called "Momentos Dados.
"[10][12][14] In that same year she was awarded the Medalla al Mérito Fotográfico (Photography Merit Medal) by the Sistema Nacional de Fototecas.
Although she has an intellectual approach to photography, often learning from contemporaries, she has also been controversial, provoking the enmity of colleagues, testing the limits of her field to avoid simply being a taker of images.
Her poetic visual sensibility constantly stimulated into action, captures the calligraphy traced in heaven by flocks of birds, a quite extraordinary series of works.
"[6] She states that her artistic ideology is:[6] meditation on art and technology, the history of art in general and photography in particular, the ideas and concrete contributions of Muybridge and Cartier-Bresson, Barthés' concept of the event, the ideas of Salvador Elizondo on text and textualism, and masterworks of painting (Velázquez) and literature.