At a lucha libre match, staying out of the way is apparently optional. London-based photographer Joe Hart learned this fairly quickly while making Aspirantes, his new photographic study of Mexico’s wrestling culture. He spent close to a month bouncing between Mexico City and Oaxaca, finding independent shows, getting himself ringside and discovering that photographing a luchador flying toward you requires a slightly different survival instinct than your average portrait sitting.
The photographs are wonderfully unruly. Masks, beer, bodies, folding chairs and flashes of saturated color crowd the frame. Someone is airborne. Someone else is probably about to be hit. Yet Aspirantes never feels like Hart went to Mexico in search of eccentric people to point a camera at. That distinction is important.
Hart became interested in lucha libre after reading about the sport and its place in Mexican culture. Once there, he went looking beyond the most obvious arenas. Finding smaller shows took actual work: Facebook groups, conversations conducted in imperfect Spanish, messages to strangers and taxis to parts of the city he otherwise would never have encountered. Some events happened in community halls and car parks rather than grand arenas.
The title came from a poster Hart spotted in Oaxaca calling for aspirantes, or hopefuls, to qualify as luchadores. It is a rather perfect word for the project because these photographs are as interested in the people building wrestling identities as they are in the spectacle those identities eventually produce.
And what identities they are.
Masks in lucha libre carry a significance that stretches far beyond wardrobe. Hart learned that wrestling characters can pass through generations, from fathers to children or from retiring performers to protégés. Losing a mask in certain matches can permanently end that incarnation of a character. A persona can therefore have a life much longer than the individual performing it.
That mythology could easily become irresistible visual bait for an outsider. Hart seems aware of the trap. His rule, he told It’s Nice That, was to make his subjects look as good as possible, even when a photograph contained something inherently funny. He distinguishes between being genuinely interested in someone and merely finding them amusing. You can see that philosophy in the pictures. The humor belongs to the world being photographed rather than being imposed on it.
Technically, Hart makes his life more difficult in exactly the right ways. He photographs with a medium-format Fuji rangefinder and powerful flashes, bringing himself physically close to the ring rather than relying on distance. The flashes can overheat, so he brings two. They also prevent him from firing off endless frames and hoping one works. Timing matters.
The reward is an almost comic-book physicality. A flash catches liquid hanging in midair. A wrestler freezes halfway through an impossible movement. Skin, masks and costumes suddenly become hyper-saturated against the surrounding darkness. Hart has said he wants the pictures to feel “bizarre but real,” which is probably the cleanest description of Aspirantes.
There is real risk involved in getting the shot. Luchadores do, after all, leave the ring unexpectedly. Hart describes having to watch both the match and his own head while working ringside. The camera does not grant diplomatic immunity from a flying wrestler.
That proximity is ultimately what gives Aspirantes its pulse. Hart is close enough for the pictures to become messy. Not careless, just alive. He photographs lucha libre as theater and athleticism, but also as inheritance, ambition and an intensely personal form of self-invention.
The masks might create superheroes, but Hart’s photographs remain curious about the people who put them on.
