Phoebe Kiely: They Were My Landscape

Oscillating between the banal and the profound, ‘They Were My Landscape’ is a collection of black and white photographs that echo the fragility of human life. Phoebe Kiely devotes her lens to the overlooked nooks, spoiled surfaces and daily detritus of urban environments to build a serendipitous landscape of an anonymous place. As we drift through her mutable world of fleeting shadows and scintillating reflections, we witness seductive moments in prosaic spectacles: refracted light cast on a concrete corner, shimmering foil in a shop window, the fractal patterns of leafless trees, or the mottled residue of bubbles on a glass faade. And now and then, glimpses of people – homeless, commuting, or standing unnervingly still – enter the book’s elusive sequence.