Mexican photographer Paulina Lavista is one of those traditional artists who do not use PhotoShop and would rather use their own hands when retouching a picture.

“Because the photograph is not digital, then it doesn’t have PhotoShop,” says the 69 year old woman with amazingly steady hands, who is preparing two, not one, exhibitions, one for the X Espacio de Arte gallery and other for the the Literary Center Xavier Villaurrutia, assuming the challenge as a chance to jog her memory.

Lavista, a photographer for more than half a century, has an acquis of more than 100,000 negatives, and now that she is more focused to documentary films, she says that she would love to continue working capturing images.

“We, the old photographers, are demonstrating that the negatives are of the outmost importance, because you can reproduce a picture ad infinitum,” she says, talking about her work with artistic nudes.

But her work was not limited to nudity per artistic reasons. She worked for a series of pornographic magazines like the legendary “Su otro Yo”, capturing the curves, and sometimes artistically hiding cellulitis and breast augmentation marks, of the most alluring stars of the so called “Ficheras” movies, an epoch considered by many the worst time for the Mexican movie industry.

Burlesque stars like Lyn May, Gloriella and Rocío Rilke where presented in beautiful color and black and white images on “Su otro Yo”, and she did those with the most prevalent artistic integrity and respect for her subjects.

“It was a work to be published, and it had to have certain characteristics. It was wonderful to go to Tepito (a very popular low class area in Mexico City), on certain areas where they had car workshops, craft shops, shoe salesmen, and see my pictures hung in there, because we made a triple fold poster… They really liked me, because I was really careful, trying to hide their scars, their plastic surgeries,” she remembers.

The key for nudity is to pose, but also of reaching a communication level hard to reach.

“Having a woman getting naked before another is easier, because there is no shame and no desire from man,” she says.

But not only women have been graced by her camera, also pointing the lens at “Borges, Norman Miller, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Juan Goytisolo, and Mexican writers like Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo – who was a very good friend of mine -, (Juan José) Arreola, José Emilio (Pacheco), Salvador (Novo) many times, Bárbara Jacobs, Julieta Campos,” and many others.

Her pictures of writers are to be exhibited in the Literary Center Xavier Villaurrutia of the National Institute of the Fine Arts, on the exhibit entitled “Personal Chronicle: Literary Life in Mexico”.