The Bears gathers photographs Alejandra Carles-Tolrá made between 2013 and 2015 among the women who played rugby for Brown University. The team gave the project its title and its central subject: a tightly bonded group whose sport places them in a space long coded as masculine, and whose presence there unsettles the inherited line between masculine and feminine. Carles-Tolrá, works at the meeting point of individual identity and collective belonging, and the pictures follow the players through strain and camaraderie alike, treating the team as a community in which selfhood can be examined without prejudice. The photographs ask what it means to be a woman who plays rugby, and who gets to decide which sports carry which gender.

The book appeared in 2024 from the Universidad de Cádiz, published with the support of Sala Kursala for the accompanying solo exhibition curated by Jesús Micó, and designed by the studio Underbau as number 101 in the Cuadernos de la Kursala series. Its form carries an argument. Twenty-four pages arrive not as a bound sequence but as unbound diptychs held in a protective folder; the folder stands for the team, while the loose pairs speak to individual freedom and fluidity, inviting readers to rearrange them and arrive at more than one reading. In a field where the photobook is often a fixed object, that decision makes sequence itself something the reader handles.

The work has since been recognised with the 2025 PHotoESPAÑA award for Best Photography Book of the Year in the Creation category. For collectors drawn to contemporary photobooks that treat structure as part of their thinking about identity, this is a considered example: a project that connects a documented team to an open reading structure, whose publisher, design and exhibition context are all documented, and whose loose-leaf arrangement rewards repeated handling and comparison.