In September 2009, Celine Marchbank’s mother, Sue Miles, was diagnosed with lung cancer and a brain tumour. Marchbank, a London-based documentary photographer, chose not to make a graphic portrayal of her mother’s death. Instead she photographed their last months together, looking at the details that made her mother uniquely herself — the things in her house she thought she knew so well, and the things that would also be gone when her mother was. “Tulip,” her first book, gathers that work. It was published in 2016 by Dewi Lewis Publishing as a clothbound hardback of 152 pages with 84 colour photographs.

The tulip of the title is not decorative. Her mother’s love of flowers was part of her personality, and the house was always full of them. As Marchbank photographed them, she realised they were symbolic of what was happening: they represented happiness, love, kindness and generosity, but also isolation, decay, and finally death. That dual register runs through the book. The subject is grief, but the method is observation — of flowers, rooms, and the ordinary evidence of a personality. Marchbank is a documentary photographer specialising in British-based stories, fascinated by the small everyday details of life.

The book arrived with early recognition. It was named The Observer Photobook of the Month by Sean O’Hagan and a photo-eye Photobook of the Week by Jordan Sullivan, and it was a selected winner in the Creative Review Photography Annual. Marchbank’s wider work has been shortlisted for several awards, including The European Publishers Award For Photography, The Deutsche Bank Photography Award, The Lucie Foundation and the Emergentes DST International Photography Award.

For a collector, the case for “Tulip” rests on what the book actually does. It is a sustained, carefully edited first book by a photographer who has continued to work on related material; her later “A Stranger In My Mother’s Kitchen” returns to similar ground. The decision to photograph a parent’s final months without reducing her to her diagnosis places “Tulip” within an intimate documentary tradition while keeping its own restraint. Marchbank is the sole photographer credited here, and the book remains the beginning of a body of work rather than an isolated volume.