The igneous dike cut through the enormous monzogranite boulder gleaming in golden hour rays. I followed the neat geologic line in the Jumbo Rocks area of Joshua Tree National Park, thinking about the late photographer Laura Aguilar.
The quartz intrusion sent me 20 yards up a wash into the sweet and spicy needles of a piñon pine tree before it vanished underground. As I walked by the blooming bladderpods, I imagined Aguilar positioning herself atop the molten rock intrusions for one of her famous self-portraits, posing nude with her back to the camera. In these photographs, she blends into the landscape like a boulderstone weathered by time.
Aguilar’s portraits captured her harmony with nature, blurring the line between human and desert. As a naturist, I’ve been drawn to her nude imitations of rocks, trees and wind. What knowledge do we gain by sitting still? By exploring our own thrusting orogenous zones and crystallizing into the landscape?
Inspired by Aguilar, I wanted to be a rock. I wanted to escape my human form and the fragility of my own failing body, even if just for a moment, as our country crumbles further into fascism. In the time- and space-bending, award-winning film Everything Everywhere All at Once, a mother and daughter transform into rocks with googly eyes. They rest on the edge of an escarpment in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, near Joshua Tree, where they have an emotional but silent conversation in subtitles. Just be a rock, the queer, nihilistic daughter says to her mother.I repeated it in meditation, imagining myself structurally rearranged, googly-eyes hot-glued onto my potassium feldspar.
“I wanted to escape my human form and the fragility of my own failing body, even if just for a moment, as our country crumbles further into fascism.”
Aguilar’s debut work documented lesbian Chicana culture and other marginalized queer communities in East Los Angeles in the 1980s and ’90s. Today, her photographs hang on the walls of international museums, from the Getty to the Tate Modern. Drawn to the desert Southwest, she also completed a series of nature nudes, beginning with Nature Self-Portrait (1996) and ending with Grounded (2006-2007), her first digital color series set in Joshua Tree.
Grounded mirrored “respite and revolution in its wild hinterland of quiet intensity … every bit of broken skin blooming in liberated relief,” wrote author Raquel Gutiérrez. “What the body wants is the earthliest of desires and in Aguilar’s bodily charge the desire is as immense as the rock formations it mirrors.”
Christopher Velasco, co-trustee of the Laura Aguilar Trust and a friend of Aguilar, said that the Grounded series was significant not only because it was a spectacle in color but because the use of color allowed Aguilar to better merge with the landscape and rocks. Photographed in the place where her ashes would rest more than a decade later, Velasco said that Grounded, in an eerie way, foreshadowed how Aguilar’s body would return to and become one with the Earth.
Aguilar wasn’t prescribing meaning when she pressed the shutter, Velasco said, and though she inserted humor into her work, it wasn’t always there. Still, there was often a sense of playfulness in the images.
That playfulness titters in Grounded #120 (2006/2007), where Aguilar cheekily bends before a crack in a towering boulder, lining it up with her own intergluteal cleft. I smile, thinking of Grounded #106 (2006-2007): a queer woman positioning herself beside a geologic feature that, in its British spelling, bears the same name as a widely reclaimed term for butch lesbians. As Sabrina Imbler, author of Dyke (Geology), wrote: “Geologists consider dykes intrusive formations, in part because they were formed underground until exposed.”
Despite the many nature nudes that came before her in art history, Aguilar fractured the genre like a fault line, sending aftershocks that have reverberated for decades. Her compositions and performative self-portraits were timeless, allowing admirers to draw a wide breadth of interpretations. On social media, many have attempted to recreate her poses, but Velasco says most of them miss the mark: Instead of blending in with the landscape, many vainly focus on their own bodies. Velasco, who manages the Laura Aguilar Instagram account, said that usually gay men are the worst offenders.
There are times when we want to expose our bare human bodies to the elements, and there are other times we long to leave them altogether, by staring into the eyes of Medusa.
Before she died from complications from diabetes in 2018, Aguilar told Velasco that he’d better not take any nude photographs of himself in Joshua Tree in tribute to her after her death. If he did, she told him she’d come back and “haunt your ass” from the grave.
I’ll never attempt to re-create an Aguilar, but like many millennials, I’m guilty of thirst traps, or stripping down for attention on social media. In my early 20s, I posted photos of my unclothed body and moon-white butt skinny-dipping in remote alpine tarns and running across desolate sand dunes. Most of it was to get attention from strangers around the world as I came to understand my own sexuality. But I also wanted to document the simple joy of being nude in nature and hoping to find others to share the sensation of sun on skin.
Here lies the duality of the human experience: There are times when we want to expose our bare human bodies to the elements, and there are other times we long to leave them altogether, by staring into the eyes of Medusa. To completely avoid being perceived. To turn into strata, a dike splitting me in two, exposing neat quartz. To become an unassuming boulderstone, watching billions of years pass before my googly eyes.
Confetti Westerns is a column that explores the queer natural and cultural histories of the American Southwest.
We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the June 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Notes on becoming a rock.”
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
