Photographs of wrestlers putting on makeup before their fights, houses with exotic interiors, masked men with their families and parties in ballrooms where the most famous wrestlers gathered, this is the work of Lourdes Grobet.
The Mexican photographer passed away this past July 15 at the age of 81 in Mexico City, but her art is engraved in the history of our country, thanks to her portraits of wrestling, a sector that for a long time was considered a subculture, especially in the eighties, which now represents us all over the world.
The mystery behind the wrestlers who fight every Sunday at Arena Mexico, the emblematic place that has seen masked fighters such as Blue Demon, Máscara Sagrada, Black Shadow, among many others is still alive, that unusual universe that very few know in depth was portrayed by Grobet.
The photographer not only made a series of works in which she enhances the value of Mexican female wrestlers who are sometimes not recognized as they should be, but also showed the human side of people behind the camera.
Who Was Lourdes Grobet?
Lourdes’ love for wrestling began as a child, when her father would go to watch wrestling, but forbade her to attend the fights, because it was only considered for men.
She studied visual arts at the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City, from which she graduated in 1960. It was not until the 1980s that she began photographing wrestlers, as she became fascinated with this world. “I decided that I would focus a large part of my efforts on wrestling because here I saw what I considered to be the true Mexican culture,” she said in an interview with AWARE, a non-profit organization in Paris.
The photographer spent more than 20 years accompanying wrestlers both in the arenas and in their daily lives. She made it to the big ones, as she took portraits of Blue Demon or El Santo doing everyday activities, such as eating at a street stall.
Lourdes forged a friendship with many of them, but in spite of that, the most famous masked wrestlers, never wanted to show their faces to her. In 2005, the legacy of thousands of images she captured, were captured in the book Espectacular de lucha libre, which was accompanied by texts by Carlos Monsiváis.
His work has been exhibited in places such as the Bruce Silverstein Gallery in Manhattan, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City and the Helmut Gershaim Collection at the University of Texas.
This story was originally published by Cultura Colectiva.
