For more than four years, from the fifth-floor balcony of a small apartment in Kanagawa, Cintia Tortosa Santisteban has filmed the rice field below her. Farmers, children, and neighbours cross it on foot, by bicycle, by car; the water, the crop, and the light change with the seasons. “Screenshots from a series of videos about a rice field and its surroundings” gathers roughly one hundred still frames drawn from an archive of more than a thousand such recordings. It is her first book.

The title is literal, and so is the method. These images are not composed photographs but frames lifted from video, a constraint that gives the sequence its peculiar tension: intimate attention to a place one knows only from a fixed distance, and a rhythm that resembles serial viewing more than a conventional photographic narrative. Figures recur, half-familiar, their stories withheld.

Editing and sequencing are by Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi, who designed the book with Perrine Serre. The result is a compact section-sewn hardcover, 160 pages and 107 plates at 10.5 by 14.5 centimetres, that treats the balcony view as theatre: a small proscenium, an unchanging stage, an endless cast.

For collectors, the appeal lies less in spectacle than in construction. The book extends a recent line of diaristic, process-based work while holding to an unusually strict conceptual rule, and its small trim size asks to be read as a sequence rather than browsed as a portfolio. Published in April 2025 in French, English, and Japanese.

Tortosa Santisteban came to photography without formal training, after studies in English literature, linguistics, and education in Granada and Galway, and she still teaches in Japan. That outsider’s patience is visible on every spread: the same field, watched closely enough to become unfamiliar.

Editions Chose Commune.