Annette LeMay Burke

As disguised cell phone towers proliferate, I find it ironic that instead of providing camouflage, their disguises actually unmask their true identities. The towers have an array of creative concealments. They often impersonate trees such as evergreens, palms, and saguaros. Some pillars serve other uses such as flagpoles or iconographic church crosses. Generally the towers are just simulacra. They are water towers that hold no water, windmills that provide no power, and trees that provide no oxygen. Yet they all provide five bars of service.

Annette LeMay Burke is a photographic artist and Northern California native who lives in the heart of Silicon Valley. A longtime observer of the evolution of the western landscape, Burke is interested in how our environment changes over time and the artifacts—both tangible and malleable—that are left behind. She examines the progress of technology as a marker of time, how the built world and natural world intersect, and thoughtfully uses irony and humor in her work.

In her series Fauxliage, she explores the odd existence of disguised cell phone towers in the landscape and how technology and our built environments are encroaching on nature. The tower camouflages also cloak the cellular equipment’s covert capability to collect valuable personal data. Daylight Books published a monograph of her Fauxliage images in May 2021.

Her work has been exhibited in the US and internationally at institutions such as Center for Photographic Art, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Candela Gallery, Griffin Museum of Photography, Texas Photographic Society, The Center for Fine Art Photography, SE Center for Photography, Academy of Art Museum, Photographic Center Northwest, and FotoNostrum Gallery in Barcelona, Spain. In 2017, she was a finalist for Photolucida’s Critical Mass. In 2020 she was a finalist for the UK’s AOP Open Award Series and in 2021 she was a winner of the Imago Lisboa Photo Festival in Lisbon, Portugal and a semi-finalist for the National Portrait Gallery competition in Washington DC.

Her work has been published in KATALOG Journal of Photography, Lenscratch, Hyperallergic, Elle Decor Italy, L.A. Times, Sierra Club Magazine, Newsweek Japan, Fraction Magazine, PDN, F-Stop Magazine, All-About-Photo.com, and L.A. Photo Curator.