2026/2027 Artist in Residence · Photography
Wendy Garrett
Los Angeles, CA
I’m a photographer, researcher, and writer based in the American West. My practice is rooted in attention to place, moving between personal narrative, historical inquiry, and field-based documentation. I photograph the West through its landscapes, particularly deserts, and the structures people have placed within them: motels, cafés, roadside signs, interiors, vernacular buildings, travel infrastructure, and the remnants of places that have changed or disappeared over time.
I’m interested in how architecture, design, commerce, myth, industry, and belief become embedded in a landscape and become a part of its historical record. People are often absent from my photographs, but human presence is everywhere in what has been built, maintained, abandoned, adapted, or preserved. My work combines photography with field research, archives, local histories, anthropology, and ecology, allowing the image to become part of a larger inquiry into how places acquire meaning and myth over time.
Wendy Garrett is a photographer, researcher, and writer based in the American West. Through photography, archival research, interviews, and field-based documentation, she traces connections and intersecting stories that are often obscured by the ways places are simplified, exploited, romanticized, or misunderstood. Her practice is grounded in sustained attention to place and a desire to understand how meaning accumulates across time, from the material evidence left behind to the histories, beliefs, and systems that shaped it. Rather than treating place as a fixed subject, her work considers it as something continuously made and remade through human presence, memory, ecology, culture, and myth.
She has self-published two photo books, Renaissance of Wonder and Stranger Passing By, and writes Alternate Routes, a newsletter exploring travel philosophy, landscape, and cultural observation. She can most often be found on the road, driving somewhere into the distance.
