One's Own Arena is the final moment in Cortes' sense-of-place trilogy, after Things Here and Things Still to Come and Costa. This time his territory is Toyama, Japan. As the title suggests, Cortes creates an arena of visual relationships, portraying men and women in their own circle of confidence alongside the city's dark alleys, bars, plants and objects. All is mixed among sequences of intimate pictures of women in his hotel room, working as studies of the body, a trademark of his work. Key to the exploration are the surfaces, the superficiality of things, as photography is by nature superficial: skin, texture, light and shadow, and even film itself, are revealed as the essence of what is to be known.