Paulina Lavista

She was drawn to photography at age fifteen, dreaming of working for National Geographic or Playboy magazine. She became frustrated with the cinema industry and began to take portraits at age eighteen.^[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.^[9] She has photographed other notable figures such as Octavio Paz, Juan José Gurrola, Ofelia Medina, María Félix, Juan José Arreola, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez, and Emilio Fernández .^[10][11] She has also done a number of self-portraits, alone or with partner Salvador Elizondo.^[12]

In 1965, she began working with the magazine Su otro yo to create a series of nudes working with models and nightclub artists such as Lyn Mei, Gloriella and Rocío Rilke.^[6][9] In 1968 Lavista was the Assistant Production Supervisor for the 1968 film on the Olympic Games held in Mexico City that year.^[13]

Lavista had her first exhibition of her artistic photography, called Photemas, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes.^{[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.^[1][15]

She is a member of the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana.^[4][16][5]

Although she is considered to be self-taught, she learned laboratory techniques at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográphicos. 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.^[6] Space constraints led her to develop two formats which she called historieta (lit.comic) and the other foto-texto (photo-text) over ten years. However, when they were exhibited at the Museo de Arte Moderno, there was controversy at the following roundtable, which concluded that these were not "photography." However, she did the same kind of work for an exhibition in 1991 at the Casa del Lago in Mexico City.^[6]

Lavista does diverse themes but movement is a prevailing element, shown in images such as that of ballerinas or flying birds. This reflects her admiration for the work of Eadweard Muybridge on locomotion and the movement in general of both animals and people in sequence.^[6] She is also noted for photographs of people in everyday scenes, mostly in Mexico City, but also in other areas of Mexico such as Alvarado, Veracruz, Tepoztlán, Guanajuato, various scenes in Quintana Roo as well as New York, Guatemala and Colombia.^[10][12] Fernando Gamboa wrote "Paulina Lavista's eys both discovery and invents worlds. 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.