Frank Aguirre’s work centers on staged environments in which photography, text, and narrative are used to elicit hidden subjective realities. His practice began in the mid-2000s, as a photographer working in the Los Angeles glamour and low-level fashion world. He gradually began to treat photography as an instrument of Surrealism, constructing encounters with real individuals in fictionalized environments, visual interrogations shaped by Freudian metapsychology, Kundalini yoga, and the erotic aesthetics of 20th-century European print glamour and mass culture.
His writing sometimes takes the form of dialogues and interviews, which examine or deconstruct concepts and situations from oblique or displaced points of view. He is particularly interested in the ways desire, ritual and control organize themselves under the constraints of social and commercial systems, and in how individuals come to occupy these systems as both subjects and collaborators.
Past work includes Milk Bone Theater (2014), a spontaneous performance art and photographic project which was set in a condemned, abandoned theater, and Berlin Underground Cabaret (2017–2022), a conceptual art and photographic project which documented an underground performance subculture from within its own secretive, closed environment. In 2025 he published Bondage on Bondagio, a novel that explores the fetishistic power structures embedded in modern life. He lives and works in the coastal forests of Humboldt County, California.
