A changing room is a threshold: the place where one costume comes off and another goes on, where the self is assembled before it is presented to the world. Chiara Calgaro’s Changing Room takes that everyday architecture and turns it into the premise of a photographic inquiry into gender identity, staged at the scale of the world’s most popular sport.

The book begins close to home. Calgaro photographs the team she plays for, a self-organized and self-funded collective of women, trans and nonbinary people, then extends the project across Europe in search of other queer squads. Faces are frequently obscured; bodies bend, twist and perform before the camera. The staging of what the publisher describes as parodic gestures is the book’s central method, and it is a deliberate one. If gender is something we are taught to enact, then an enacted exaggeration may also loosen its grip. The locker room becomes a microcosm in which other ways of being together, and of participating, can be rehearsed.

The photographs are edited by Calgaro with Melissa Pallini and Altana, and the volume carries texts by Alma Sammel and Deniz Nihan Aktan, with translations by Sara Madonia. Melissa Pallini designed the book, a softcover of 23 by 28.3 centimeters issued in a first edition of 500 copies, accompanied by six stickers, with text in English and Italian. In 2026, Changing Room received the PHotoESPAÑA Best Photography Book Award in the First Publication category.

For collectors attuned to photography that treats sport as a social space rather than a spectacle, this is a considered and unusually specific project: a first book, a defined print run, and a subject approached through collaboration with the people depicted. It rewards attention to sequencing as much as to individual frames.