Paulina Lavista

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 and the Chopo Museum all in Mexico City as well as at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin . 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." In that same year she was awarded the Medalla al Mérito Fotográfico (Photography Merit Medal) by the Sistema Nacional de Fototecas.

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. 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.

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. In 1968 Lavista was the Assistant Production Supervisor for the 1968 film on the Olympic Games held in Mexico City that year.

She always had problems at school, attending middle and high school in five different schools before entering the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos (CUEC). She was the first class of the new institution, with Jaime Humberto Hermosillo. However shortly after entering the family finances took a downturn and she decided to turn to modeling to earn money. She had success in this, appearing in commercials for chewing gum and hair dye. After this she worked in movie productions in the 1960s with Aldo Monti and then with Rafael Corkidi and Antonio Reynoso in their company Cine-Foto. 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.

Paulina Lavista (born November 1, 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, beginning a career in modeling and cinema before moving into photographic work in the 1960s. She began with portrait work, with one of her first clients being longtime partner Salvador Elizondo, 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 Salón de la Plástica Mexicana.