The photographs in A Glass Darkly were made across more than twenty years, in Kent and in London, and most of them in the hour when daylight gives out. Kevin Lear turns street corners, walls and roadside structures into sculptural forms, and the familiar city into something alien and faintly menacing. Published by MACK in 2017, this is his first book.

Lear studied at Rochester College of Art in the 1960s and later lectured at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London. Through the late 1970s he drove trucks between freelance commissions, and kept working on this body of pictures. That doubled life shows in the images: they read as the observations of someone passing through a place at the end of a working day, attentive to what others hurry past.

The book is modest in format and deliberate in construction: 96 pages, 36 tritone plates, a debossed hardback with tip-in, 22 by 28 centimetres. The tritone printing serves the narrow tonal range these twilight scenes depend on, and the sequence is paced rather than merely gathered. Restraint of this kind is not incidental; it is how the unease in the pictures is built.

For a collector, the interest lies in a first book that arrives after decades of quiet making. Lear was shortlisted for the MACK First Book Award in 2015, and his work is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Media Museum in Bradford. A Glass Darkly is where this early, long-sustained project is set out as a considered whole — an argument about British urban landscape photography made from the margins of a working life.