"The Bears": Women's University Rugby Team

EVERY DAY PHOTOGRAPHERS AROUND THE WORLD looking for new ways to tell stories or to capture what we previously did not notice. We choose interesting photo projects and ask their authors what they wanted to say. This week we are publishing the project of the Spanish photographer Alejandra Carles-Tolra "The Bears" about the weekdays of the regbies from the team of Brown University. In a series of portraits, Carles-Tolra explores stereotypical ideas about women involved in "male" sports.

"The Bears" is a series of portraits of the girls that make up the rugby team at Brown University. Being part of an environment with high intellectual requirements, the students, meanwhile, decided to try themselves in the form of sport, which requires powerful physical commitment. Starting to engage in such a sport, you inevitably find yourself part of a community that does not just challenge you physically - it strengthens your body and spirit. I like to shoot young women who join the team not only for the sake of sport, but also to become part of a community with a very strong self-awareness, where they can find themselves.

With the help of these portraits, I try to expand our understanding of group identity. Women who choose this sport are usually portrayed as part of a masculine stereotype. But what does it really mean to be a rugby player? Is there a separate phenomenon like "woman in rugby"? Or are these ordinary girls just playing rugby? Rugby is often described as a sport that cultivates "elegant violence", and this greatly simplifies its essence. When removing my heroines, I want to emphasize the duality, ambiguity inherent in this sport and the athletes involved in it: aggressiveness and grace, weakness and strength, femininity and masculinity.

In 2016, women's rugby competitions will be part of the Olympic Games for the first time. In addition, Brown University raised the status of women's rugby: for 37 years it was considered a club game, and recently became a full-fledged inter-university sporting event. Brown University became the tenth American university and the second member of the Ivy League to take this step. We are all now witnessing a historic event, in which athletes successfully bring new meanings to the category of masculine sports.

Removing cadets of the military department for the project "Fall In", I learned a lot about the difficulties women face in areas that have been historically considered masculine. Since then, it has been incredibly interesting for me to document the lives of nascent women's groups that are part of male communities. I have always been fascinated by the process of forming group identities and how they are affected by the environment. At some point, this hobby led me to sociology, and then to photography. I felt the need for a universal language that would allow me to expand my horizons. And photography has become an ideal way to continue my research and to describe its results. My main creative interest is to find out what the relationship between an individual and a group is and how one influences the other.