Contemporary photographer Chiara Sophie Becker presents Changing Rooms, an exhibition accompanied by a photobook. Together, they explore identity, bedroom culture and the intimate spaces where a generation of Parisian youth is still becoming itself.
By Devincan Türkmen
Twenty minutes ago I was standing in a fitting room, trying on a Burberry coat that either made me look like someone who had their life together or someone who had stolen it. The lighting wasn’t helping. Neither was the mirror, offering three angles I had no interest in meeting. Somewhere between slipping it on and deciding whether it belonged to me, I realised that this is, more or less, what your twenties feel like: standing under unforgiving lights, trying something on and hoping it fits before anyone catches you halfway through the decision. A career. A city. A degree. A relationship. A version of yourself.
That constant state of becoming and changing sits at the centre of photographer Chiara Sophie Becker’s Changing Rooms. Opened in Munich on July 23rd, the exhibition gathers portraits made over the course of a year while Becker was living in Paris, completing her studies and photographing the people around her.
Munich became the place where she chose to let those images be seen. Alongside the exhibition comes a book: bedrooms, hallways and borrowed living rooms of change inhabited by a generation suspended somewhere between who they have been and who they might become.
The title is almost too obvious until you realise it isn’t speaking metaphorically at all. A changing room has always been less about clothes than permission. Four walls and best-case a lock are enough to suspend the expectations waiting outside. For a moment, identity becomes sacred.
Why Bedrooms Matter More Than Ever
Before social media offered curated versions of ourselves to the world, the bedroom was where identity rehearsed in private. Posters appeared and disappeared. Shelves filled with books we wanted to become associated with. Clothes migrated across chairs instead of back into wardrobes. Every object, deliberate or accidental, quietly declared authorship over who we believed ourselves to be.
Of course, not everyone has the privilege of a room that feels entirely their own. Space is shaped by circumstance as much as taste. Class, gender, race, family expectations, money, age, even the square metres available to you quietly determine how freely identity can be rehearsed. A room doesn’t simply contain a person. It expands or restricts the versions of themselves they are able to imagine.
A Room Is Never Just a Room
A new candle changes the way the whole room feels, and smells. Suddenly, you’re not quite as anxious as you were yesterday. The rug softens every step, making the walk from the shower feel unexpectedly comforting. The lamp rescued from a pile of discarded sofas outside a neighbour’s garage casts the kind of ambient light that makes an ordinary evening feel cinematic. An old bedside table quietly persuades you to read more, to buy flowers simply because the room deserves them. We shape our rooms, and slowly they begin shaping us in return.
And like us, rooms remember, too. They remember the Polaroids you tore apart. The string lights you clipped above your bed before taking them down again during a season when the room grew darker than usual. They remember heartbreak. As obnoxious as it sounds, the hoodie you once wore every week disappears because the friendship attached to it quietly dissolved. Then a thrifted polo borrowed from someone new slowly becomes yours instead. Or those strips of photo-booth film tucked into a drawer, continuing to rearrange the room years after memories of the holiday itself have faded.
Eventually, rooms stop functioning as rooms altogether. They become archives. Shelves hold previous selves. Drawers remember relationships long after people have left. Walls absorb joy, uncertainty, loneliness, ambition, even the person you brought home once and never again. What remains is less an interior than a living exhibition, continuously curated by someone still deciding what deserves to stay.
That quiet incompleteness is precisely what Becker refuses to resolve. Her portraits never arrive at certainty. A subject pauses at the edge of an unmade bed. Someone lingers halfway through a hallway. Nothing appears fixed, and that is exactly the point. These photographs understand that identity is rarely revealed in grand transformations. More often, it lives in hesitation, in the moments before a decision settles into permanence.
Perhaps that is why Changing Rooms feels so familiar and reminiscent of early Tumblr. It isn’t documenting youth as much as recognising that becoming never entirely ends We simply move from one room to another, exchanging different uniforms, different expectations and projections in the same mirrors.