Rik Garrett is not the kind of photographer who looks at a camera and thinks, “Great, let’s make things clearer.” Garrett’s art often does the oppositeand that is exactly the point. Their photographs invite viewers into the foggy territory between documentation and ritual, science and superstition, body and spirit, history and imagination. In a world where everyone has a high-resolution camera in their pocket, Garrett keeps returning to slower, stranger, more physical photographic processes: film, wet plate collodion, silver gelatin printing, handmade books, camera-less experiments, and techniques inspired by spirit photography, Kirlian photography, occult texts, and early photographic history.
That combination makes Rik Garrett a fascinating figure in contemporary analog photography. Their work is spooky without being cheap, erotic without being shallow, and mystical without pretending to hand you a tidy answer wrapped in moonlight. Think less “haunted house gift shop” and more “19th-century darkroom philosopher who knows how to make a photograph feel like a spell.”
This profile explores Garrett’s background, major bodies of work, artistic themes, and why their photography continues to resonate with viewers interested in occult photography, wet plate collodion, fine art, spirit photography, and the beautifully stubborn magic of analog image-making.
Who Is Rik Garrett?
Rik Garrett is an artist, photographer, educator, and bookmaker known for exploring the invisible through photographic processes. Born and raised in Washington State, Garrett began making images early, receiving a camera as a child and later developing a deeper relationship with photography through the darkroom. Their mother’s work as a photographer and the experience of seeing a home darkroom take shape helped turn photography from a casual activity into a lifelong creative language.
Garrett later earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has taught at institutions including SAIC and Photographic Center Northwest. Their career includes solo and group exhibitions in the United States and Europe, as well as lectures on the history of occult photography. That teaching background matters because Garrett’s photographs are not simply “moody images.” They are built on research, process, references, and a clear fascination with how photography has been used to make invisible things appear visibleor at least appear possible.
The key phrase here is appear possible. Garrett’s work does not beg the viewer to believe every ghost, aura, ritual, or spirit is objectively real. Instead, it asks a better question: Why do humans keep creating tools, stories, and images to reach beyond the visible world?
The Artistic Language of Rik Garrett
Garrett’s photography sits at a rare intersection of analog craft, esoteric history, body-based experience, and personal mythology. Their images often feel old because the methods are old: wet plate collodion, silver gelatin prints, hand-applied paint, re-photographed archival material, and photographic paper exposed in unconventional ways. But the questions behind the work are very modern. What does intimacy look like? How do grief and memory attach themselves to images? Can a photograph represent an aura, a spirit, a ritual, or a psychological state without becoming a gimmick?
Why Analog Photography Matters in Garrett’s Work
Analog photography is not just a nostalgic costume in Garrett’s practice. It is the engine. When a plate must be prepared, exposed, and developed by hand, the photograph becomes an event. Mistakes, streaks, scratches, chemical accidents, and unstable light are not always flaws; sometimes they become part of the meaning. Digital photography often promises control. Garrett’s process welcomes risk. The darkroom, in this context, is not merely a workspace. It is a laboratory, a studio, a chapel, and occasionally a very dramatic chemistry set.
This tactile approach helps Garrett’s images feel physically present. Their photographs do not look like they were casually captured and filtered in three seconds while waiting for coffee. They look summoned, handled, argued with, and coaxed into being.
Earth Magic: Witchcraft, Nature, and the Power of Reimagining
Garrett’s best-known body of work is Earth Magic, a series photographed with the wet plate collodion process between 2010 and 2013 and later published as a monograph by Fulgur Press. The project explores historical, fictional, and personal relationships between witchcraft, femininity, and nature. Instead of portraying witches as villains, cartoons, or Halloween props, Garrett imagines a female-centered, nature-based ritual community that exists outside ordinary society.
That sounds grandand it isbut the photographs themselves work because they do not over-explain. In Earth Magic, the viewer is not handed a neat caption that says, “Here is exactly what this ritual means, please admire responsibly.” The images create atmosphere through bodies, woods, gestures, darkness, texture, and silence. They feel private. They suggest worship, play, secrecy, and power. They also challenge the old cultural habit of turning witches into either monstrous threats or decorative fantasy figures.
The wet plate collodion process adds another layer. Because the method is associated with 19th-century photography, the images feel as though they belong to a parallel historyone in which witchcraft was not only feared and hunted but practiced, preserved, and photographed on its own terms. The result is haunting, but not in a lazy “boo!” way. It is haunting because it feels like we are seeing evidence from a world that may have been hidden on purpose.
Symbiosis: Love, Bodies, and Becoming One
Before Earth Magic reached a wider audience, Garrett created Symbiosis, a series made between 2010 and 2011. The works are small analog C-prints altered with acrylic paint applied directly to the surface. The images explore love, relationships, alchemy, magic, and mutually beneficial partnerships in nature. Visually, they show couples whose bodies appear fused together, as if intimacy has become a literal physical transformation.
The series can look strange at first glance. Then it becomes funny. Then tender. Then slightly uncomfortable. Then oddly beautiful. In other words, it behaves a lot like love itself. Garrett’s painted interventions remove the clear boundary between one body and another. The viewer is left wondering where one person ends and the other begins, which is basically the emotional thesis of many relationships, minus the shared streaming password.
Symbiosis stands out because it avoids the glossy clichés of romantic imagery. There are no sunset silhouettes, no perfect smiles, no commercial softness. Instead, Garrett gives us flesh, awkwardness, dependence, vulnerability, and merger. It is romance viewed through the lens of biology and alchemy. The work suggests that love is not always about staying perfectly separate and elegantly composed. Sometimes it is about becoming entangled and hoping nobody asks you to explain the anatomy.
Subtle Bodies and the Attempt to Photograph the Invisible
Subtle Bodies brings Garrett’s interest in occult photographic history into sharper focus. The series uses variations on older techniques associated with attempts to photograph spirits, auras, time, and other invisible forces. It includes works inspired by Kirlian photography, spirit photography, Walter John Kilner’s aura-viewing experiments, and the legendary Chronovisor, a supposed device said to view events from the past.
What makes this series compelling is Garrett’s refusal to flatten the subject into either belief or debunking. Kirlian photography, for example, has often been promoted as a way to capture auras, but it is also understood in scientific terms as the visual recording of electrical corona discharge. Garrett’s work does not need to “prove” an aura in order to matter. Instead, it examines why images of energy, light, and bodily presence become emotionally powerful.
In the context of fine art photography, this is a rich position. Garrett is not selling supernatural certainty. They are using historical methods of the unseen to explore identity, grief, intimacy, memory, and the viewer’s hunger for meaning. A photograph can be chemically explainable and still feel mysterious. A darkroom print can be technically grounded and still make your neck hair politely stand up.
Wonders of the Unseen World: Hollow Earth and Obsession
Wonders of the Unseen World premiered as a solo exhibition in Seattle in 2018. The project explores the mythos of the Hollow Earth and the human obsession with what might exist beneath the surface. The title carries layered references, including occult literature, Cotton Mather, hidden worlds, spiritual speculation, and the long history of humans imagining secret realms below or beyond ordinary perception.
This project reveals one of Garrett’s greatest strengths: they understand that esoteric subjects are not merely “weird.” They are cultural mirrors. Hollow Earth theories, spirit photography, aura experiments, and grimoires all point to the same human impulse: the suspicion that the visible world is not the whole story. Garrett’s images turn that suspicion into atmosphere. The viewer is asked to descendnot necessarily into the Earth, but into obsession itself.
Leviathan and Goetigraphs: Photography as Ritual Action
In Leviathan, Garrett created a mural-sized original photograph measuring 41 inches by 12 feet. The work was made using methods drawn from historical magical spellbooks in an attempt to call the spirit Leviathan to visible appearance on photographic paper. Whether one approaches that concept as ritual, performance, art history, or poetic experiment, the result expands what a photograph can be. It is no longer only an image of something. It becomes the trace of an action.
Goetigraphs pushes that idea further. In this series, Garrett spent a year, from August 2019 to August 2020, working through all 72 spirits of the Goetia. The project drew from grimoires, spirit registers, ritual timing, sigils, and camera-less photographic methods. Garrett placed light-sensitive photographic paper in ritual arrangements and treated the resulting marks as records of attempted contact.
The significance is not simply that the subject is occult. The significance is that Garrett uses photography as a system of encounter. The photographic paper becomes a receiving surface. The darkroom becomes a ritual space. The final image becomes residue: a mark left by time, intention, chemistry, light, and belief.
Fiat Lux, Going Forth, and the Art of Transformation
Garrett’s later projects continue to investigate transformation, destruction, and renewal. Fiat Lux, meaning “let there be light,” uses standard photographic materials in unconventional ways to explore light as both physical reality and symbolic force. In this work, Garrett has repurposed unsatisfactory wet plate photographs by stripping emulsion, burning collodion scrapings, and creating new photographic prints from the destruction of old images. It is a dramatic process, but also a precise metaphor: sometimes art grows by setting its failures on fire. Carefully, of course. Preferably not near curtains.
Going Forth, a handmade artist’s book created between 2021 and 2022, reflects on aging, life, death, self-improvement, the pandemic, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and the history of photography. The work connects ancient materials and beliefs with the origins of photographic image-making, including references to bitumen and early heliographic processes. Like much of Garrett’s practice, it treats photography as more than image production. It becomes a way to think through mortality.
Why Rik Garrett’s Photography Stands Out
Rik Garrett’s photography stands out because it is deeply researched without feeling academic in the dusty, “please footnote your goosebumps” sense. Their work is intellectually layered, but it also hits the body first. You feel the darkness, the texture, the intimacy, the charge. Then you start asking questions.
Garrett also belongs to a broader lineage of artists who understand photography as a strange invention from the beginning. The camera has always been tied to evidence, memory, death, presence, absence, and belief. A photograph says, “This was here,” even when what appears in the image is staged, altered, accidental, symbolic, or impossible. Garrett uses that tension beautifully.
Key Themes in Rik Garrett’s Work
- The invisible: Garrett repeatedly investigates spirits, auras, memory, grief, energy, and hidden forces.
- The body: Bodies in Garrett’s work are intimate, vulnerable, ritualized, transformed, or merged.
- Analog process: Film, wet plate collodion, silver gelatin printing, and handmade techniques shape the meaning of the work.
- Occult history: Grimoires, witchcraft, spirit photography, magical texts, and esoteric symbols provide recurring frameworks.
- Personal mythology: Garrett’s projects often connect historical research with lived experience, grief, relationships, and self-examination.
How to Experience Rik Garrett’s Work
The best way to approach Rik Garrett’s photography is to slow down. These images are not designed for the half-second scroll. They reward patience. Look at the surfaces. Notice the blur, the marks, the scale, the darkness, and the way bodies appear as presences rather than simple subjects. Garrett’s photographs often feel like documents, but documents from a reality that refuses to behave itself.
It also helps to understand that the occult references are not decorative sprinkles tossed on top for spooky flavor. They are structural. The historical processes, magical texts, and ritual gestures inform how the works are made and how they operate. Garrett is not just photographing “witchy” subjects. They are asking what happens when photography itself becomes witchy: when light, chemistry, timing, intention, and belief all enter the room together and nobody wants to be the first to turn on the overhead lamp.
Experiences Related to Rik Garrett: What Viewers Can Learn From the Work
Encountering Rik Garrett’s work can be a strangely useful experience, especially for artists, photographers, writers, and anyone who has ever felt that ordinary images are too tidy for complicated feelings. Garrett’s practice teaches viewers that a photograph does not have to explain everything to be meaningful. In fact, some images become stronger because they hold something back.
For a photographer, Garrett’s work is a reminder that process matters. Modern image-making often rewards speed: shoot, edit, upload, repeat, check the likes, question your life choices, repeat again. Garrett’s analog methods resist that pace. Wet plate collodion requires preparation and patience. Handmade books require touch. Silver gelatin prints demand time in the darkroom. Camera-less experiments require trust in materials. The experience of studying Garrett’s work can encourage photographers to ask not only “What am I photographing?” but “Why should this image exist in this form?”
For viewers interested in art history, Garrett offers a doorway into the long relationship between photography and the unseen. Spirit photography, aura images, occult diagrams, séance documentation, and early photographic experiments all reveal how people once treated the camera as both machine and medium. Garrett revives that tension without turning it into a museum display. Their work feels alive because it uses history as fuel, not wallpaper.
For writers and storytellers, Garrett’s projects are a lesson in atmosphere. The strongest pieces do not rely on loud explanations. They build a world through suggestion. A forest, a body, a strange mark on photographic paper, a ritual title, a handmade book, or a damaged surface can carry narrative weight. This is especially valuable for anyone writing about mystery, memory, grief, or transformation. Sometimes the most powerful story is the one that leaves a little smoke in the room.
For anyone navigating personal change, Garrett’s work also offers a quieter lesson. Projects like Symbiosis, Subtle Bodies, and Going Forth suggest that identity is not fixed, love is not always neat, grief does not obey logic, and the body carries more meaning than language can comfortably hold. The photographs do not solve those experiences. They give them shape.
That may be the most lasting experience of Rik Garrett’s art: it makes uncertainty feel worth looking at. Instead of rushing to define the unseen, Garrett lets it remain unsettled. Their images say that ambiguity is not a failure of meaning. Sometimes ambiguity is the meaning. And honestly, in a world that keeps pretending everything can be turned into a bullet point, that feels refreshingly rebellious.
Conclusion: Rik Garrett and the Beauty of the Unresolved Image
Rik Garrett has built a distinctive body of work by treating photography as an encounter with the unseen. Through wet plate collodion, analog photography, occult history, spirit photography, handmade books, and deeply personal themes, Garrett creates images that feel old and contemporary at once. Their art does not ask viewers to choose between belief and skepticism. Instead, it asks them to stay in the charged space between the two.
That is why Garrett’s work matters. It reminds us that photography has never been only about clarity. It is also about longing, evidence, illusion, memory, death, desire, and the deliciously human habit of wondering what else might be there. In Garrett’s hands, the photograph becomes less like a window and more like a threshold. Step carefully. The darkroom door is open.
Note: This article is an original editorial synthesis based on publicly available artist, publisher, educational, museum, and art-publication information. It is written for web publication without source links in the body copy.
