Paulina Lavista

Paulina Lavista (born 18 June 1945) is a Mexican photographer, noted for her controversial work which has tested the limits of the field. She is the daughter of a composer and a painter, and later breaking into more artistic work with a series of nudes for the magazine Su Otro Yo. She has photographed many subjects from the Mexican art scene as well as images of people in every day activity, mostly in Mexico. She is a member of the .

She thought of being a writer growing up but also remembers being fascinated by a photograph of a ballerina in mid-air. This prompted her to return to CUEC to continue her studies. During this time she met photographers such as Juan Rulfo and Héctor García Cobo, which inspired her to explore photography. She continued with cinema, she worked on production of Fando y Lis by Jodorwsky and Mariana by Juan Guerrero. She was a production manager with Publicidad Ferrer and during the 1968 Summer Olympics she coordinated visual works. 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 . She has also done a number of self-portraits, alone or with partner Salvador Elizondo.

In 1965, she began working with the magazine to create a series of nudes working with models and nightclub artists such as Lyn Mei, Gloriella and Rocío Rilke.

Lavista had her first exhibition of her artistic photography, called Photemas, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. 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 In that same year she was awarded the Medalla al Mérito Fotográfico (Photography Merit Medal) by the Sistema Nacional de Fototecas.

She is a member of the .

Artistry Although she is considered to be self-taught, she learned laboratory techniques at the . 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. 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 , 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.

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. 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. 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."

She states that her artistic ideology is: