Lucha Libre, The Family Portraits

Lourdes Grobet has documented the spectacle of Mexican professional wrestling, known as lucha libre (free fighting), for more than 25 years. The only woman to have worked in such proximity to the sport, Grobet has photographed the masked luchadores in many contexts--and always in their signature disguises, which practitioners have worn since 1942, when a wrestler named El Santo stepped into a Mexico City ring wearing a silver mask, literally changing the face of the game forever. The mask, always a symbolically rich object in Mexican culture, serves both as a retreat (into anonymity) and as an attack, as a weapon with which to disconcert and terrorize the opponent. Its visual appeal, especially when set in scenarios outside the ring, was quickly apparent to Grobet, who describes El Santo as "one of the teachers that most influenced me early on." In Lucha Libre: The Family Portraits, Grobet shows the wrestlers with their mothers, wives and girlfriends, sitting for w