Joe Hart captures the surreal, gnarly energy of lucha libre by getting bravely close to the action

The famous luchadore Alberto El Patrón once said “In Mexico, luchadores, the wrestlers, are the only Mexican superheroes. And to keep the mystery behind the mask is really important.” When London-based photographer Joe Hart went to Mexico after reading about Lucha Libre, Mexico’s colossally entertaining and culturally significant form of wrestling (Lucha means ‘fight’ and libre means ‘free’), he decided to spend the better part of a month across Mexico City and the Oaxaca region.

Here, he integrated himself into every independent show he could, and found that wrestlers are elevated to the status of celebrities – in fact, it’s much part of the culture that those famous masks you’ve all seen aren’t a costume, but an identity. Like Alberto said, they’re the only Mexican superheroes. What Joe found, as he created his new photography project titled Aspirantes (inspired by a poster in Oaxaca calling for ‘aspirantes, hopefuls, to come and qualify as luchadores’), was that he wasn’t just photographing the high-flying theatrics of lucha libre, but he was creating a collective portrait of wrestling’s personhood.

We’re accustomed to a kind of photography which feels like it’s gawking rather than observing, critical over curious – that’s not present here. Joe is not only getting stuck in, but his presence was proof of sincere integration due to the fact it was so difficult to find rougher parallel circuits, ones where bloody battles would take place in car parks or community halls. “It wasn’t one visit, it was a month of trawling Facebook groups, messages in broken Spanish and taxis into corners of the city I’d never have found otherwise,” says Joe. “The rule was that even if an image is inherently funny, I want to make people look as amazing as I can. Approaching subject matter I genuinely find interesting rather than just amusing makes the whole difference.”

The masks in lucha libre are incredibly important, so much so that wrestlers don’t take them off, as Joe tells It’s Nice That: “In certain matches you can lose your mask permanently, which basically kills off the character.” However, Joe learned that masks get handed down across lineages of wrestlers, a character can be inherited from a father or passed to a protégé when someone retires. “It means the stories run over decades rather than seasons and a character can outlive the person who invented it,” says Joe.

Lucha libre is high-energy, filled with flying elbows, flying kicks, flying chairs. In fact, there are up to 76 recognised ‘flying’ moves in lucha libre, as well as moves called ‘gory cradle’, ‘dragon sleeper’ and the ‘double team facebuster’ – needless to say, if you get hit with one of these, you’re going home on a stretcher. Joe navigated the incredible buzz of being in these situations by doing what anyone else would: get merry, have fun and wake up the next day feeling like he’d been in a strange dream. For the photos, he would get as close as possible, accepting the risk of being hit by a strange clothesline from hell. “These are performers and skilled athletes rather than a brawl, but they genuinely come flying out of the ring, so being ringside with a camera means you learn to watch the fight and your own head at the same time,” says Joe. “The flash does the rest. It freezes a split-second at maximum intensity and pushes everything into something hyperreal.”

As for the technical side of shooting such photos, Joe shoots on a medium format Fuji rangefinder. Optimal for his high-octane shots – cameras such as these boast wide fixed lens for close pulls, and when doubled with a powerful flash (always two, because they’re bound to overheat), Joe is forced into a more deliberate type of photography. The high-powered flashes don’t allow for a spray-and-pray style of shooting, but they can capture sprays of beer and blood in the air like a comic book frame. “The flash is what creates the saturation and the contrast, so the edit is really about pushing it a bit further rather than inventing it. I do a whole treatment I couldn’t even begin to explain. I want the work to look bizarre but real, like a strange dream,” says Joe, chasing the same kind of hungover, head-battered feeling he’d get the day after seeing Mexico’s real life superheroes defy gravity, bodyslam each other into the ground and ultimately win the hearts of the nation.