Through her extraordinary collection of still frames captured from the videos she records every day, Cintia Tortosa Santisteban explores the daily life of a rice field and the passersby she observes from the fifth floor of her balcony.

Everyday, Cintia Tortosa Santisteban films from the balcony of her small fifth-floor Japanese apartment—it’s like a ritual. Below, a rice field unfolds along with the comings and goings of passersby, farmers, and children. On foot, by bike, or by car. Cintia observes this daily life as though it were a series, made up of fleeting and unique moments that reveal the hidden details of days that follow one another without ever being the same.

Since 2021, Cintia has been collecting videos of this landscape she watches over. From these recordings, she has created still frames that capture the changing seasons, shifting colours, and recurring figures who pass along the rice field—figures you think you recognize without knowing their stories.

Screenshots of a Rice Field and Its Surroundings, Cintia Tortosa Santisteban’s first book, features around a hundred images selected from an archive of over a thousand videos. It offers a small window into the theater of everyday life.

Biography

Cintia Tortosa Santisteban (born in 1989) is a Spanish photographer based in Kanagawa, Japan. Her formal education is in English literature, linguistics and education at the University of Granada (Spain) and Galway (Ireland). She is currently working as an English teacher in Japan. She has no formal background in photography or the arts. She has learned through books, the Internet and friends. She has been interested in visual arts since she was a kid but it wasn’t until the end of 2019 that she started taking it more seriously.