Lourdes Grobet (1940-2022) was a contemporary Mexican photographer known for her photographs of lucha libre wrestlers taken both in the ring and at home doing every-day tasks. Over the course of more than 30 years since 1975 she photographed the masked professional wrestlers known as luchadores, eventually publishing – beginning in 1981 – more than 11,000 photos. Her images served to demystify the sport in her own country, and her 2005 book, Lucha Libre: Masked Superstars of Mexican Wrestling, introduce the sport to a wider audience in the U.S. and internationally.
According to Grobet, the sport followed an age-old tradition of mask-wearing in Mexico, one that predates the Spanish conquest. Inside the ring, she said, you could find the real Mexico, explaining she didn’t want to photograph a cliched version of her native land. According to The New York Times, Grobet once said that anyone who thought that lucha libre was camp was indulging in “a social class prejudice, perhaps referring to the 2006 Jack Black comedy Nacho Libre.
Though Grobet studied painting at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico and counted Gilberto Aceves Navarro and Mathias Goeritz among early influences, she was introduced to photography by Kati Horna before a 1968 trip to Paris changed everything. She discovered kinetic art during gallery visits, and after working with jazz pianist Juan José Calatayud for whom she designed lighting and projections that changed with the music during a series of concerts, it is said she returned to Mexico and burned all her paintings and drawings. From then on, she focused on photography with side projects in performance and film.
In the late 1970s Grobet attended the graphic design and photography programs at Cardiff College of Art and Derby College for Higher Education in Britain and was failed by professors for altering the landscapes she photographed (she reportedly painted rocks and other natural features with house paint, drawing the ire of the locals), but she didn’t let that annoyance cloud her vision. Grobet has had her work displayed in more than 100 group and solo exhibitions, including her first New York solo show in 2005, at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery. She won an award at the Second Biennal in Fine Art Photography and had her work exhibited in the London Mexfest festival in 2012.
Grobet’s work is part of the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and the Fundación Cultural Televisa and Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, among other institutions.
At MacDowell in 2002, she worked on a project called "Painted Landscapes," working out how to create a 3D space that exhibit goers can move through to view landscapes painted with paint and light. She also began the writing for Equilibrium and Resistance, her documentary focused on the Bering Strait. She continued work on that film in residence in 2007.
