Ricky Adam’s Back to Back gathers photographs made across Leeds between 2006 and 2024, taking the city’s terraced housing as its persistent subject. The eighteen-year span gives the work a temporal reach beyond a single assignment: buildings and streets are encountered repeatedly as parts of an inhabited urban landscape, subject to weather, use and gradual change. Adam’s concern is not an abstract idea of Leeds, but the recurring architectural fabric through which the city is experienced at ground level.

The photographs are organized by season—autumn, winter, spring and summer—rather than as a straightforward chronology. This structure places shifts in light and atmosphere alongside the longer duration of the project. Seen from the position of someone moving through the streets, the terraces become both setting and motif. Repetition matters: rows, façades and adjoining structures establish continuity, while each encounter remains particular to its moment and location.

That combination of sustained attention and seasonal sequencing distinguishes Back to Back from a brief architectural survey. The book considers a familiar housing form through accumulation, allowing ordinary streets to carry historical weight without turning them into monuments. Its significance lies in this close observation of a specific city over nearly two decades, and in the way the photobook form draws dispersed photographs into a coherent account of place.

Published by Audit in 2025, the 144-page hardcover gives collectors a concentrated body of documentary work grounded in Leeds and in the visual culture of northern English streets. Its value within a photobook collection rests on the precision of its subject, the extended period of its making and the seasonal editorial framework through which Adam’s photographs are read together.