Phoebe Kiely’s They were my Landscape takes shape as an accumulation rather than an argument. Published by MACK in 2018 as a 96-page Swiss-bound paperback, the book draws on Kiely’s compulsive cataloguing of the Manchester streets and suburbs around her. What emerges is not a portrait of a city in the conventional sense but a fragmented picture of a place that is simultaneously personal and anonymous—a terrain known intimately and yet resistant to fixed meaning.

Kiely works in black and white, and her sequence moves without announcement among portraits, objects, and street scenes. A young man smoking at a bus stop, a mother carrying a child, cracked concrete, the flattened feathers of a pigeon on a road: each is given comparable weight. That leveling of attention is the book’s method. By refusing to rank the monumental above the incidental, Kiely makes ordinary surfaces and passing figures carry the pressure of observation. The photographs do not explain one another; they accumulate, shift, and return, creating a rhythm that feels as fragile as the everyday life it records.

The work belongs to a larger, ongoing project in which Kiely tries to find a sense of self through her surroundings. The urban and suburban fabric is not backdrop but material for self-location. The book’s elusiveness is deliberate: identities remain partial, places are recognized and then lost, and the sequence withholds the closure of a documentary survey. What stays with the viewer is the tension between proximity and distance—the sense of a photographer both inside and outside the world she catalogues.

For collectors, They were my Landscape is notable for its restraint and for the way its sequencing asks to be read across images rather than consumed one by one. The Swiss-bound paperback format and MACK’s 2018 publication place it within a serious strand of contemporary photobook-making, where design and edit are as consequential as individual frames. It rewards attention to how a body of work can be built from fragments, and to how a personal geography can be made without maps.