Courtney Allen, Splendor, 2024

It took Courtney Allen more than half a decade, and thousands of miles of travel across a dozen states, to create the images that make up her first monograph Splendor. As the title suggests, the American landscape is characterised by an undeniable sense of glory and grandeur. ‘If we can comprehend the capacity for beauty in any situation, it is there,’ says the author. ‘It is a primary and universal experience.’

In these photographs, the almost inescapable built environment complicates and confuses our different expectations of nature: to be nurtured, conquered, to stand on top, to be held within. Allen’s meditative wandering in the natural world is punctuated by moments when things seem out of place, as if awoken from a dreamlike state.

‘To be inside a Courtney Allen image,’ Kathleen Alcott notes in her essay, ‘is to eavesdrop on a discussion between the secular and the divine, the sentient and the constructed, the eternal and the recent.’ Importantly, these tensions are not simply described by Allen, but rather evoked, as we see things not only through her eyes, but as a collective experience, an act of community between people who have been drawn to these sites.