Editorial RM presents Lucha Libre: The Family Portraits, Lourdes Grobet’s beloved 2009 photographic exploration of Mexico’s iconic masked wrestlers and the worlds they inhabit beyond the ring.
At first glance, lucha libre—Mexico’s flamboyant style of professional wrestling—might appear as pure spectacle: masked figures in tight costumes battling under bright lights to the delight of roaring crowds. But to reduce it to performance is to miss its deeper cultural resonance. Lucha libre is more than entertainment in Mexico; it’s myth-making, political theater, family legacy, and national ritual.
With roots stretching back to the early 20th century, it embodies narratives of resistance, identity, and transformation. The luchador, cloaked in anonymity, becomes a symbol: a folk hero, a social archetype, a figure who battles both literal and metaphorical opponents.
It is this layered world that Lourdes Grobet beautifully documents in Lucha Libre: The Family Portraits. Over more than 25 years, Grobet immersed herself in the universe of Mexican wrestling—not merely photographing its arenas or matches, but entering the homes of the wrestlers themselves, breaking through the veil of spectacle to reveal the humans behind the masks, without ever stripping away their myth.
Grobet (1940–2022) one of Mexico’s most prolific and boundary-pushing artists, was uniquely suited to this undertaking. Born in Mexico City into a Swiss-Mexican family and trained under pillars of Mexico’s post-war avant-garde such as Mathias Goeritz and Kati Horna, she embraced photography as a tool for radical documentation. After returning to Mexico in the 1970s, she joined the experimental collective Proceso Pentágono, known for its incisive social critique. This background deeply informs her approach to Lucha Libre: The Family Portraits, which is not only a compelling and often beautiful photographic project but also a quiet act of cultural redefinition.
One image, featured on the book’s cover, encapsulates her vision perfectly. A masked luchador sits sandwiched between two women—perhaps his mother and daughter or partner—on a floral-patterned sofa, framed by crochet covers, plastic sunflowers, and turquoise curtains. He is in full costume, yet relaxed and at home. The women lean against him with ease and affection. There’s no irony here, no forced juxtaposition. Just the ordinary fact of a larger-than-life character living a life much like anyone else’s.
What emerges most strikingly in moments like this is a sense of unexpected softness. These masked figures, who in the ring exude bravado, aggression, and mythic swagger, are shown here in quiet, emotionally open moments. This visual contradiction is the heart of Grobet’s artistry. She doesn’t photograph luchadores as warriors in the ring, but as parents, partners, workers, capturing them in kitchens, bedrooms and offices.
They remain masked and in character, yet everything around them is resolutely unglamorous and real. The effect is not to diminish the myth, but to reposition it: to show how these icons live with, and within, everyday life. Stylistically, Grobet uses available light and familiar visual language—often evoking the style of family photo albums—to create images that feel at once surreal and sincere. Her use of symmetry, saturated color, and domestic detail creates a strange visual harmony: the mask never feels out of place; it becomes just another part of the setting, like a family heirloom or Sunday clothes.
In Lucha Libre: The Family Portraits, Lourdes Grobet offers far more than an archive of a sport. It is a quiet, yet powerful meditation on identity, community, and the dual lives we all lead. Her images are both funny and touching, strange yet dignified. They reveal not only the people behind the masks, but the deeper cultural truths the masks protect.
Lucha Libre: The Family Portraits is published by Editorial RM and can be purchased through their website.
All images © Lourdes Grobet