“The biggest stars of lucha libre are hailed as superstars. When they walk into the arena, they have their own music playing, and they see thousands of people wearing their masks. They’re rich. They sell their own merchandise, they do commercials – they’re like football players.

But although she wanted to show how these stars are idiolised, by way of explanation for all the physical abuse the participants put themselves through in the name of entertainment, her focus soon turned to more up-and-coming wrestlers, partly out of practical necessity, but largely because this is where she found the most intense drama.

“The people I came into contact with were the smaller stars, and they wanted me to photograph them because they thought I could make them more famous. The big stars were, ‘Who are you?’ – they wanted me to pay to photograph them. So I started photographing the new talent, and that was the most exciting story, because they’re willing to go more extreme and do crazier things to be seen. There are so many people in Mexico who want to become lucha libre stars that you have to do something extraordinary to be different and make it somehow.”

Just how crazy is evidenced by her pictures of the relatively new phenomena of “lucha extrema”, which resemble real street fights. “It’s difficult to see the difference between show and violence,” she says. “They cut each other, making the blood flow to create spectacular and sensational shows. The audience shout for more and challenge the wrestlers to be more extreme. Giving themselves 100 percent, the wrestlers destroy their bodies, because each fight might bring them one step closer to the big shows and stardom.

One picture, her portrait of Aeroboy (real name Jesus) [left], captures this succinctly. “He was 18 at the time, and he’d been fighting for five years already. Now he’s on the point of making it as an extreme fighter, but it’s taken so many fights. They fight with barbed wire and smash light tubes on each others’ backs and set themselves on fire – all kinds of crazy things. Now he can’t fight normal matches because he’s known for his extreme fights, so he has to keep doing more and more extreme things keep pushing the boundaries.”

The series was shot as her final project at the acclaimed Danish School of Photojournalism in Aarhus, which came to international attention in the last decade with a crop of photographers using complex compositions shot in wide-angle with large depth-of-field, typified by Joachim Ladefoged. In addition to an excellent programme of visiting lectures, the course places strong emphasis on internships, and Galbiati landed the best of all, working with Politiken, the Copenhagen-based newspaper world renowned for its use of photography. During her 18 months there she shot two major projects, one examining the refugee crisis in Yemen, and the other following economic migrants returning home Poland.

“It’s the hardest place to get internships because they allow you to do a lot of work while you’re a student; they’re famous for letting the new ones take all the great assignments,” she says. “You work really hard for a year-and-a-half; harder than all the staff photographers because you want to make a good impression and learn as much as you can in that short period of time. And if you get a good assignment, you get a really great opportunity to prove yourself.”

She also attributes the success of the school to its small class sizes – just eight photographers are accepted each semester. There’s no place to hide. “Everyone has really high expectations, so you always try to push yourself – you don’t want to be the one putting up the worst project on the board. It’s a really tight class, so you really get to know people and what they’re capable of, and you can see if they’re not doing their best, so you’re trying to help each other to move your photography forward.”

Three months after graduating last summer, she became a mother for the first time, which has temporarily halted her freelance career, but gave her the opportunity to use any spare moments to push the lucha libre work, and so far it’s picked up first place in the sports story category of Danish Picture of the Year, and third in the US-based Pictures of the Year International contest.

She hopes to return to Mexico eventually to continue work on the project, and one of the objectives would be to try and uncover some of the even more extreme fights she’s heard about, staged in backyards at private parties. But one of her biggest challenges first time round was persuading her subjects to let her photograph them both in character and unmasked. “They would show me their home, but then I couldn’t show that they did lucha libre. And if I showed them with their mask, I couldn’t show them as a real person.” Going back, she hopes to get more of a sense of these people and the conditions they’re trying to escape from.

www.saragalbiati.com