because, as per her statements, El Santo had an amazing body and the one on screen was fat, which she felt was insulting.” By 1985, after accumulating a large amount of photographs of different aspects of wrestling, Lourdes decided that she had an almost complete record on the subject, but with the appearance of Superbarrio as the defender of the homeless of the earthquake of September 19th as well as of the neighbors and suburbanites who were fighting for a foothold in Mexico City, she discovered a new variation: the lucha libre not only encompassed the worlds of show business, cinema, comics and soap operas, but it pertained to society and politics as well. In Super barrio she discovered an association between one of the deepest veins of popular culture and the utopias of the revolutionary left wing. Her camera recorded the moments when this fighter showed support for Cuahtémoc Cárdenas’ campaign for the presidency in 1988 and 1994. When she met Fray Tormenta –the fryar who financed a home for abandoned children with his earnings from professional wrestling–, Lourdes saw another way that the mask surpassed the limits of the arena and spilled over into real life. At the Aguascalientes convention in the state of Chiapas, which waws called for by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional on February ninth, 1995, she joined the shouts of the crowds that answered a tremendous “NO!” when subcommander Marcos asked them if the people who were joined there wanted him to take off his black ski mask. “If he takes off his mask, then the myth is
broken”, said the photographer. At the Encuentro Intercontinental por la Humanidad y contra el Neoliberalismo, she portrayed the encounter between two famous masked men: subcommander Marcos and commander Tacho. Her first photo exhibit on the subject of the lucha libre was inaugurated in August of 1981 at the Galería del Bosque. During the ceremony, the referee El Vale held up the photograph which proclaimed his fame high, showing that the wrestling medium gave its recognition that he was one of their own. In addition, K.O. magazine –normally an exile from the world of art galleries– published a loving chronicle of the event: “We passed attendance at the brand new photo exhibit by Lourdes Grobet at the Casa del Lago in Chapultepec, and in keeping with our sense of the truth we must say here that our colleague has made a brilliant selection of her work […]. The spectators who have seen this exhibit have given their praise to Lourdes’ art, and in truth, dear readers, it is worth your while to take the time to see these photographic exhibition […]. As a fan, you will savor each graphical document captured by this young woman’s talent”. On the subject of that same exhibit, art critic Katya Mandoki wrote in Sábado, cultural supplement of the newspaper Unomásuno: “The deepness of the manifest meaning is what distinguishes expressive photography from informative photography, because, even though both comply with the condition of informing, the connotations of the former include and surpass the brute transmission of data (who won, how he lost,
etc.). This is what makes Lourdes Grobet’s photography different –they are presently on display at the Casa del Lago from those which appear in specialized wrestling magazines. More so, artistic photography can thus gain a large audience which would include not only the aficionados, but also other spectators with diverse interests.” Mandoki can’t help asking herself what wrestling is doing in an art gallery: “How is it that a subject of the popular sort, indeed, of the lowest class, of pure machismo, can attract a female photographer of the middle class with an artistic education seems just a bit odd.” She explained Lourdes’ work’s authenticity by the fact that “the lucha libre is linked to the author’s childhood as an element of the forbidden”. If it had not been that way, she writes, “the result would have been different: a superficial vision of the show business, the objectification of its main characters, just the formalization and aesthetification of its situations.” For that journalist, the photos were valuable because of their expressiveness, and, in an act of justice, Mandoki showed her support by quoting Virginia Aguilera, an aficionada who has been going to the arena for more than 40 years, who when she saw the photographs on exhbition exclaimed: “this is what it feels like when you see the fights”.
There is no doubt that Lourdes Grobet would not agree with the negative remarks about “informative photography”, which Katya Mandoki infers are characteristic of wrestling magazines. The photographer affirms that if she was never interested in working as a graphical reporter
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