Lourdes Globet did not allow his father to participate in a professional wrestling match in Mexico because she was a girl, but later in both the ring and in everyday life, in an image of a masked Lucador slamming her body. Became the best known photographer. She died on July 15th at her home in Mexico City. She was 81 years old.
Her daughter Ximena Pérez Grobet said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
For nearly 20 years, Globet has been innovative in introducing her photographs, including life-sized photographs of prisons and naked men and women, various light sources, and installations where viewers explore a maze that includes fake floors. I found a way.
But around 1980, she stepped into the wrestling arena with a camera, and the sport known as lucha libre, which means “free fight,” is part of the culture of the indigenous Mexicans, which was not effectively explored. I believed.
“I was very surprised at the event.” She told AWAREA non-profit Parisian organization promoting female artists in an interview in 2021.
Grobet (pronounced grow-BAY) has been photography of wrestlers for over 20 years as a journalist rather than an anthropologist. She takes them to the arena, changing rooms, homes, and their usual work, with historical ties to Aztec and Maya culture, without the characteristic lucha libre masks that represent Mexican strength and empowerment. I rarely drew.
In her fascinating image, a terrifying Blue Demon in a silver mask with silver eyes, nose and mouth is portrayed in a three-piece white suit, tie, pocket square and cuff buttons. increase.
El Santo, one of the most famous Le Chadors, eats light meals from outdoor vendors.
Fray TormentaThe priest who supported the orphans in his parish as a wrestler wears his red and gold masks along with his gold clothes while hoisting the communion moderator in the church.
A female wrestler, also in a red and gold mask, wraps her two little sons in her cape. Another gives her baby a bottle. Others put on makeup. Grobet had a special sense of intimacy with the dual life of a female wrestler, playing in the ring while raising her family.
Two of Globet’s favorite themes, El Santo and Blue Demon, were the only Lucadors she had never seen.
“And I didn’t want to see them.” She said in a 2017 interview with the artist series, Online interview with photographer and filmmaker Ted Forbes. “Other wrestlers, I went to the arena,” they were wearing masks when she started taking pictures.
She took thousands of photos of wrestlers (and their fans), many of them in the book “Lucha Libre: Masked Superstars of Mexican Wrestling” (2005, 2005). Carlos Monsivice).
This book was published before the movie was released in 2006. Parody “Nacho Libre” starring Jack Black It was inspired by the life of Fray Tormenta. (Mr. Black’s personality is a monastery cook, not a priest.) Mr. Globet’s son Xavier Globet was the cinematographer.
Shortly before the film was released, she expressed her desire to treat sports politely, and in the New York Times, anyone who considered lucha libre a wild pastime was indulging in “social class prejudice.” Said.
“Lourdes was a pioneer in directing the lens to the general public,” said Seila Montes, a Spanish photojournalist who took pictures of Lucador from 2016 to 2018, finding “ordinary and marginal sublime.” I wrote in an email.
Maria de Lourdes Grobet Argüelles was born on July 25, 1940 in Mexico City. Her father, Ernest Globet Palacio, was a cyclist at the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The last person to finish a 1,000-meter track time trialHe later owned a plumbing business. Her mother, Maria Luisa Argeles de Globet, was her housewife.
Grobet said he came from a family of “sports fanatics and body worshipers” watching wrestling on television, but his father refused to let her attend the match directly.
“He didn’t think it was something women should see,” she told journalist Angelica.Abelleyra in a dateless interview. “He didn’t want us to be friends with the ring or the” ass “of the audience. “
Mr. Globet was a gymnast as a girl and a dancer at the time. After she studied classical dance for five years, she became bedridden with hepatitis and she was unable to exercise for a long time.
When she recovered, she began taking formal painting classes, after which she studied at the University of Ibero Americana in Mexico City, especially under painters and sculptors. Matthias Göritz And surrealist photographer Katy Orna.. She graduated with her bachelor’s degree in visual arts in 1960.
As a painter, she told Aberella, “I was looking for something in between abstraction, sculpture, and expressionism,” but the media was offensive. She switched to her photography while studying in Paris in the late 1960s.
Mr. Globet wasn’t asking for ordinary in her pictures. In Britain in the late 1970s, she took pictures of landscapes transformed by painting rocks with colorful house paints.Later, she photographed a landscape of Mexico decorated with flowers. Cacti and plants she drew.. Some of those photos were included in the 2020 group exhibition, “Out of place: a feminist view of the collection” At the Brooklyn Museum.
She held solo exhibitions around the world, but not in the United States until 2005, when the Bruce Silverstein Gallery in Manhattan held a career retrospective. Her work is in the collection The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Kebranli Museum in Paris, the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, and the Helmut Gelsheim Collection at the University of Texas at Austin.
In addition to her daughter Ximena and her son Xavier, Grobet has survived by another daughter, Alejandra Pérez. Grobet; Another son, Juan Cristobal Perez Grobet. Her sister Maria Luisa Globet Argeles. Her brother, Ernesto Grobet Argüelles and six grandchildren. Her marriage to Xavier Perez Barba ended with a divorce.
In the mid-1980s, Grobet launched a 30-year project to film the actors of the Mexican local theater company Laboratorio Teatro Campesinoe Indígena.
“When I saw these performances, it felt the same as when I first saw Lucha Libre,” she said in an interview with AWARE. “I wasn’t taking pictures of the indigenous people. I was taking pictures of the cultural paradigm.”
