Courtney Allen: Splendor

Courtney Allen: Splendor by Tracy L. ChandlerJune 12, 2025

Courtney Allen’s debut monograph, Splendor, is a celebration of attention and the complex beauty of the American landscape. Published by Deadbeat Club, Splendor explores what it means to witness—to look outward at a world shaped by myth and infrastructure, and inward toward a quieter, more personal register of seeing.

Courtney and I share the same publisher and have spent a lot of time together this past year traveling to promote our books. It’s been a wild ride, and I’m so glad we’ve been on it together. Now, it feels good to pause and spend more reflective time with her work.

In this conversation, we discuss the pull of photographing the landscape, the legacy of road trip photography, and the layered perspectives that photography invites. Knowing Courtney, it’s no surprise that so many of her images carry a sense of magic and serendipity. I’m grateful to share this exchange with an artist and friend whose work feels as spacious and searching as the land itself.

The following is an interview with Tracy L Chandler in conversation with Courtney Allen.

TLC: I feel a deep pull to photograph the American landscape. I wonder if that is because it is both “stuff of legend” and my familiar home and maybe I am trying to close the gap between those two notions. Or maybe it is because I have seen it photographed again and again and I want to be included in that conversation. I don’t know exactly. Maybe all of it. I am wondering if you feel that pull too? What first got you interested in going out to explore our country with your camera?

CA: This is a great question and I still don’t totally know. I think the initial pull came from the lore. Not just the myth of the American West, but the myth of the road trip photographer, which at that time for me meant people like Stephen Shore, Bill Eggleston, Joel Sternfeld, etc. There was something frustratingly impossible about those pictures. Not just the images themselves (at the time, I was still shooting 35mm, trying to make 4×5 pictures), but the sheer assuredness to drive around the country alone for weeks. How did they feel safe? How did they pay rent? So, I think part of it was, not to necessarily debunk it but, to prove to myself that I could do it too. I was introduced to artists like Sophie Calle and Sam Contis at that time who had a big influence. Their work, for me, has such a rich interiority and sense of intimacy. They were showing me a different way to approach the world. So I wondered if it was possible to reconcile it all––was there a way to approach the American landscape from a place of intimate attention rather than assumed safety and superiority? It felt almost like a dare. So in that sense, I didn’t really know what type of pictures I was going to make in the beginning. The landscapes then kind of presented themselves to me.

TLC: I totally get that frustration with what seems accessible for some and not for others and I too want to push those perceived boundaries. It seems when we take that step into the unknown, our attention peaks and the world becomes more salient… It’s as if the universe is conspiring with us, and as you said “the pictures present themselves.” I like to think we can take credit for getting the whole effort underway. It takes courage to venture out, it takes courage to make something.

When I look at your pictures, I feel like I am seeing a few modes of picture making… in some there is this sense of direct experience, a subjective POV of sorts, and then in others there is a more objective distance, more of a sense of looking at than looking through. Do you have different modes of making? Do you feel those modes result in different kinds of pictures? What do you feel is the most Courtney picture of the pictures?

CA: The feeling that “the universe is conspiring with us” is exactly it! That’s what I love about photography. When you go out to pay that kind of attention, you can get rewarded.

I know what you mean about the different modes of picture making. I really just try to visualize my first impression. I think the pictures that feel more distant are the ones in which I felt I’d been presented with a scene. You’re driving, you take one turn, and then Bam!…like, I cannot believe the world is presenting me with this. So I try to honor that debut. The writer Anne Carson has this amazing line where she describes traveling to a place that felt like, “a place came there and crashed.” And that’s what the more distant pictures feel like for me––a kind of moment landing. And in that sense, I’m trying to make a more formal portrait of that landing.

I feel the same way about the pictures that are more intimate in scale, or the more “direct” ones as you say. I am not consciously making different types of pictures, but honoring my first impression. For me, seeing someone rest in the sun can evoke the same feeling as seeing a vista at sunset. I’m more so trying to visualize that feeling.

The most “Courtney” picture of pictures is such a good question! Maybe the picture of the road sign blinded by light against the Texas mountains. There is something funny about it––nature completely dominating our little infrastructure, making a sign completely useless and devoid of any language. And yet, this particular combo of the man-made and the natural world creates a mutated kind of beauty. Kathleen Alcott (who wrote the essay accompanying the book) described it beautifully, saying the sign, “emphasizes the grace of the mountains beyond it, an exclamation mark at the end of a gentle thought.”

TLC: I love that picture. The light is blinding but also so alluring. We can’t look away. Speaking of looking away, can we talk about the portraits? All or most of the people in this book have obscured faces or are looking away. Sometimes I wonder if they are prompting us to look with them and follow their gaze into the landscape but in others they seem to be going inside, to a place we can’t go. Can you talk about how you make portraits? Are these people close to you–or strangers? How do they guide you through the work?

CA: I love how you say that some guide you to a place we can’t go. That’s exactly how it feels to me while making them. The portraits in Splendor are both of people I am close to and also strangers. What interests me is less about making a portrait of a person’s uniqueness within the landscape, and more so making a portrait of a universal feeling. I love catching people deep in the act of witness or rest in nature. I’ve found that when people (myself included) become aware of the camera, they get pulled out of themselves and focus more on presentation. What I find beautiful is catching them in experience, whether it’s drying off in the sun, or getting washed over by a flock of birds. The more obscured portraits, for me, get at this idea that this experience is not unique to one person––it’s universal. In that sense, I wanted the collection of portraits to feel like a celebration of that.

TLC: It’s interesting how photography has all of these different points of view layered together… the photographer, the subject, the viewer. How does making a portrait change your experience of the landscape?… like does photographing a person in the scene shift your own connection with the splendor?

CA: It really is amazing that photography can hold so many points of view at once and yet has no means (responsibility?) to make them explicit. Making portraits, for me, doesn’t pull me out of my own experience of splendor. It adds to it, really. Nothing is better than being surrounded by people in absolute awe of the same thing you are. The fact that we can collectively experience and respect the same thing at once feels important, and I think that’s what I’m trying to capture with the portraits. Like the pictures of birds throughout the book. Each year, purple martins pass through Round Rock, TX as they migrate south. Usually, they roost in the small trees planted in parking lots of chain restaurants like Chili’s or Ojos Locos or Denny’s off of highway I-35. And witnessing around 200,000 birds, in unison, alongside birdwatchers and bystanders, all paying attention to the same thing, all within the most quintessentially American landscape: the suburban parking lot. It just gets to the real heart of it for me. It’s hard to explain, but in a way it feels simple.

CA: …Speaking of layering in the viewer’s point of view, that’s something we don’t have much control over. That’s one thing I love about photobooks is how they open up little worlds for our imaginations to play in. We make connections based on our own context, and oftentimes our interpretations aren’t necessarily aligned with the photographer’s intention. I’m wondering how that has felt for you. The book-out-in-the-world part is so different from the making-pictures part. Your book, “A Poor Sort of Memory,” in particular, is so rich with personal history and unique characters and clues, but people may/will interpret it totally differently. I guess I’m curious how you reconcile the two parts: the making and the letting go.

TLC: Yes, so many layers of viewing! And yes, for me the experience of the book “in the world” is very different from the making of the work. Each of my pictures is so highly specific to my personal story, but there is no way others would know any of that just by looking. My hope is the more I make the work true for me, the more something universal will transmit to the viewer. I love when someone has a read on a picture that is wildly different from my own. That’s so satisfying to me. I want the pictures to be portals for others to enter into their own world.

Speaking of portals, Is there an image in your book that feels close to a personal memory—something you didn’t just see, but also transported you to another place or time?

CA: There’s really only one in the book that felt that way. It’s of a big puddle on a beat up road at sunset, and the water is reflecting the very pink and very orange sky. I was in Bennington, Vermont visiting my close friend and I remember it felt like Georgia, which is where I’m from. Something about the post-rain heat on asphalt, the lush green, the long days kind of landscape. It made me homesick for Georgia but also for another time.

TLC: Homesick for another time! I did notice a recurring motif of reflections throughout the book. And shape and color carries over from one page to the next. Was this born in the process of photographing or realized after the fact in the edit. Can you tell me how sequencing for this book came about?

CA: I’m really happy to hear that comes through in the edit! It’s funny, the first sequence was actually put together by my good friend Isaac in 2019. He was thinking of starting his own imprint and wanted to start with this project. It was the first time I’d even considered the work as a book, and seeing it realized in InDesign suddenly made it seem possible. He didn’t start the imprint, but he left me with a draft. I applied to the Penumbra Foundation’s Long Term Photobook Program in 2021 with a version of that draft, and that kind of changed everything. We were tasked with considering sequence through a series of constraints and, ultimately, creating final maquettes. I can’t remember how many iterations––endless. When I met Clint at Chico in 2022 (with you!) and began to work with him, we had the maquette as a kind of rough framework to build from. It mostly meant rearchitecting some of the structure, filling in gaps, building tension where needed, pulling images that disrupted the flow, and fine-tuning how things felt visually. It was super intuitive and collaborative. I remember Clint saying that he could be persuaded about anything but that I would have to sell it. I needed that in order to understand how to kill my darlings. We banged out the sequence in a weekend. It was an incredibly vulnerable experience to let someone in and trust them wholeheartedly. I couldn’t imagine anyone else being able to build that trust so quickly and effectively as Clint and Alex Woodside.

TLC: Amazing humans, those two. In my experience trust in your collaborators is an imperative part of feeling safe enough to really push into your creative potential. When you have a cohesive team, everyone grows, everyone succeeds. Not because we are all perfect experts but because there is grace in learning and daring to make mistakes together. It just makes it fun.

Ok, one last question.. “If you could go back and whisper something to yourself at the beginning of this project, what would it be?”

CA: “Organize your negatives.”

TLC: Indeed!

Splendor is published by Deadbeat Club and is now available for purchase. The book is also available in special edition with linen bound slipcase and special edition print.
Courtney Allen (b.1988) is an American artist and photographer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work explores our relationship to nature and the built environment. Splendor, published with Deadbeat Club, is her debut monograph. She is co-founder of the curatorial project Magic the Gallery. She received her BS in Photojournalism from Boston University in 2010.

Follow Courtney Allen on Instagram

Tracy L Chandler is a photographer based in Los Angeles, CA. Her monograph A POOR SORT OF MEMORY is now available from Deadbeat Club.

Follow Tracy L Chandler on Instagram.