Splendor by Courtney Allen (Deadbeat Club, Los Angeles, 2024) is the debut monograph from the Brooklyn-based photographer. It runs to 80 pages in full colour, bound in a flexi-cover with a tipped-on image and foil stamping, and includes an essay by novelist Kathleen Alcott. Made over more than five years and thousands of miles of travel across a dozen states, the book explores the grandeur of the American landscape and our ideas of the sublime. It also shows where our hopeful expectations of nature meet the reality of our impact on it. Allen’s meditative pictures of famous natural sites are punctuated by moments where something seems out of place, as if waking from a dream, and by portraits of fellow visitors drawn to the same views. The result feels like a shared, communal experience of wonder. It is a luminous contemporary landscape photobook for collectors of American photography.