Lourdes Grobet, a Mexican wrestling photographer, left us at the age of 81. The sport was always part of her life, however, so were the gender stereotypes that did not look favorably on a woman being interested in spaces that seemed mainly masculine.
As a child, she became a fan of televised wrestling, but her father never agreed to take her to the arena, without this taking away her passion for the sport. Already an independent young woman, she took her camera and visited the sands of the center of the country.
The biggest stars of wrestling passed through her lens, but her work not only focused on the heroes of the ring and also portrayed the passion of the public: the places where the fights took place, the locker rooms, the before and after of the Fight. Grobet looked at the art that exists in and around wrestling, both in the spaces and among those who participate.
It’s impossible not to recognize her photographs documenting women fighters. About them, Lourdes Grobet said that they lived a double struggle, “that of being a woman and the struggle of being a fighter”.
She knew what it was to suffer gender stereotypes, and her photographic work on women in wrestling dignified and made visible the powerful work they do in their attempt to win spaces that have been denied them for decades. With her sensitivity and passion, she was able to enter the intimacy of these women, observing their daily life, and the contrast between the lights and the screams of the arena with the calm of nursing a child or maintaining a home.
The sands of the country are in mourning. Lourdes Grobet will no longer look through her camera. The woman who attended arenas across the country for more than 30 years, who was not afraid to appear in a medium that seemed off-limits to her, who heard praise, and criticism, who saw chairs fly over her head while documenting one of the most iconic and identifying sports in Mexico, she is gone, but the artistic legacy she leaves us reminds us that, like her images and the great stars she portrayed, she is also immortal.
Amelia Warner
Amelia Warner writes all the Latest Articles. She mostly covers Entertainment topics, but at times loves to write about movie reviews as well.
