Rik Garrett was born and raised in Washington State. Against the grey skies and green foliage of the Pacific Northwest he spent his formative years combating the boredom of mundane daily life by creating artwork, writing stories and reading books about the fantastic and mysterious. Garrett was given his first camera at the age of six. He watched his mother study photography and eventually open her own portrait studio.
At the age of 14 he followed her lead and picked up his first real camera – a Nikon that his grandmother had given his father. Lacking any overt religious or cultural traditions, he latched onto photography as a family heritage. Over the years he found the historical connections between his seemingly divergent interests: the medium of photography being married to esoteric studies throughout history via spirit photography, thoughtography, Radionics and Parapsychology.
Drawing on the historical precedent of the apparently static realm of analog photography having been used to document the invisible, further studies caused him to dedicate himself to exploring the liminal realms between supposed opposites: documented reality and fantasy, science and the occult, visible and invisible, past and future. His explorations have taken many forms: photographs exhibited in the United States and Europe, long-range handmade book projects, mixed media pieces and explorations with Kirlian photography. Long-term fixations on the subjects of witchcraft, feminine archetypes and humankind’s relationship with nature led to the Earth Magic series, photographed with the wet plate collodion process. Garrett currently lives in Chicago with his wife Jane.
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