I haven't been able to figure out how to access the details of my backup from my mac. When i click on icloud in iphoto, there are 2 labels, My Photo Stream and Shared Albums. Neither show pictures that were backed up from the iphone.
The iCloud backup of your iPhone cannot be used to save photos from your phone to iPhoto. you can only use he iCloud backup to restore the iPhone data to the iPhone. (see: iCloud: Backup and restore overview)
if you have enabled "My Photo Stream" on both your iPhone and your Mac, all new photos you take on your iPhone will automatically be visible on the Mac in the iCloud section and you can import them to the iPhoto library or save them automatically there with auto import.
The easiest way, however, to save all photos from your iPhone to your mac would be to connect the iPhone to a USB port on your Mac and to import all photos from the Camera Roll to iPhoto.