I Imagined It Empty (Editorial RM, 2024)

I Imagined It Empty by Ruth Lauer-Manenti was inspired by several pictures the photographer took of her mother in 2017, just before she passed away. “My mother rarely let me photograph her except in the last week of her life when she changed her mind. Each day as she approached her death, she became more beautiful.” 

The book is a silent and moving contemplation of life beyond life and the desire to find solace and presence within the walls of the place that we choose to call home. The loss of dear ones is reflected in the sense of belonging to a place, a house full of history, which also carries on the life of others. “I know that I will not live in this house forever. The house will hopefully outlive me, but I wonder if a part of me will outlive the house.”

Splendor (Deadbeat Club, 2024)

It took Courtney Allen more than half a decade, and thousands of miles of travel across a dozen states, to make the pictures that comprise her debut monograph Splendor. As the title implies, there is an undeniable sense of glory and of grandeur in the American landscape. “If we can understand the capacity for beauty in any situation, it is there,” she says. “It is a primary and universal experience.”

And yet, attending the light there is always a darkness; in these photographs, the almost-inescapable built environment complicates and confounds our varied expectations of nature: to be nurtured, to conquer, to stand atop, to be held within. Allen’s meditative meandering of the natural world is punctuated by moments when things appear out of place, as if one has been awoken from a dreamlike state. 

“To be inside a Courtney Allen image,” Kathleen Alcott observes in her essay, “is to eavesdrop on an argument between the secular and the divine, the sentient and the manufactured, the forever and the recent.” Importantly, these tensions are not merely described by Allen, but rather evoked, as we see things not only through her eyes, but as a collective experience, an act of community among people who have also been drawn to these sites.