Annette LeMay Burke

Memory Building


Time changes everything. That cliché became painfully relevant for me after my parents died within a few months of each other, forever changing my family structure. The unconditional love I received from them throughout my life was now gone. I was left with only their physical possessions and my memories of our lives together. Their possessions included a well-organized archive of family photos. In this series, I projected those vernacular family photographs onto the surfaces of my childhood home. By juxtaposing the photos from the past onto the present-day walls, I unearthed 60 years of engrained memories and tried to capture my family’s vanishing history that once permeated this house.My parents’ house exemplifies the post-war ranch homes built in newly created neighborhoods across the United States. They decorated their home in the Early American style popular in the 1950s. (Some now refer to it as Coloniawful.) They lived in this house from the day they were married until their deaths—from their 20s to their 80s—and much of the original furniture they bought remained in the house throughout their lives. Their stability provided me a solid foundation for my upbringing.Constructing the projected tableaus made the memories more tangible for me and provided comfort for my grieving. With so many formative experiences rooted and intertwined within this building, saying goodbye to it was also saying goodbye to my parents. Even as the rooms were literally whitewashed in preparation for new owners, my memories continued to resonate within the walls.


Carpintarias de São Lázaro




My Playhouse

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 how memories influence perceptions of place. In May 2021, Daylight Books published a monograph of her work titled Fauxliage: Disguised Cell Phone Towers of the American West. Burke’s work has been exhibited widely throughout the US and internationally. In 2021 she was the winner of the Lenscratch Vernacular Photography Exhibition and a semi-finalist for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery competition in Washington DC. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, Elle Decor Italy, L.A. Times, Sierra Club Magazine, Daily Mail, Newsweek Japan and Fraction Magazine.

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