Photography

Annette LeMay Burke is an award-winning artist and Northern California native. With a background in geology from the University of California, Berkeley, Burke's lens has long been attuned to the ever-evolving contours of the western landscape.

Burke’s work was selected for LensCulture Critics' Choice 2024. Her work was exhibited at London's Royal Geographical Society, cited by the Australian Geographic Environmental Awards, selected for Photolucida’s Critical Mass Top 50, awarded first place in the Lenscratch Vernacular Photography Exhibition and won the top award at the Imago Lisboa Photography Festival in Portugal.

Burke’s work is exhibited widely throughout the US and internationally. Her images have been featured in The New York Times, L.A. Times, The Times (London), Sierra Club Magazine, Newsweek Japan, and the Daily Mail. Her work is held in public and private collections including the Wieland Collection in Atlanta and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

Burke’s monograph, Fauxliage: Disguised Cell Phone Towers of the American West, was published by Daylight Books in 2021.

Visit atelierlemay.com to learn more about Annette's work.

About Fauxliage: Disguised Cell Phone Towers of the American West

Fauxliage captures the proliferation of disguised cell phone towers across the American West. By attempting to conceal an unsightly yet essential technology of the modern world, the landscape is now adorned with a quirky and unsettling mosaic of masquerading palms, conifers, flagpoles, crosses, and more. These structures are 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.

Beneath their often-whimsical camouflage lies a more clandestine narrative of surveillance capitalism, where big tech and government entities commodify our every digital interaction. The environmental repercussions are equally concerning: the aging faux trees shed plastic needles, adding to the ecological toll of our digital age. What began as an attempt to reduce visual pollution is now creating plastic pollution.

Traversing ten western states to document this architectural phenomenon, Fauxliage examines technology's dual role as a disruptor and unifier within the landscape. The disguised towers provoke a crucial question: How much ersatz landscape and manufactured nature are we willing to accept for connectivity?

As fifth-generation (5G) technology advances, these elaborate towers may become architectural relics of the past, and fade into obscurity like drive-up photo kiosks, phone booths, newsstands, and drive-in movie theaters. Coincidentally, those functionalities are now seamlessly integrated into our handheld devices — a poignant reminder of the evolution of the technological landscape.

Jessica Chen is a documentary photographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. A native Californian, Chen was born in San Francisco and grew up in Pacifica, a coastal beach town along the Pacific Coast Highway.

She earned a B.S. in Environmental Design with an emphasis in Visual Communication and a B.A. in Studio Art from the University of California, Davis, then went on to earn an M.F.A in Design and Technology with an emphasis in Narrative and Documentary Film from Parsons School of Design at The New School in New York City. Chen is on the board of the East Bay Photo Collective, and member of the American Photographic Artists (APA SF), Los Angeles Center for Photography (LACP) and Women in Street (WiS).

Her photographs have been published and exhibited in over 50 group exhibitions across the U.S. and internationally.

Visit jchenphotographs.com to learn more about Jessica's work.

About  People, Parades and Protests (2015 - Present)   

There are many genres of photography, street photography being a unique beast. The street is its own living breathing entity. In my series, People, Parades and Protests, I explore the energy of “flow” between seemingly disparate movements, motivations and emotions between people. I study how people navigate and organize themselves in public spaces in relation to each other. Their inner world often reveals themselves in gestures, expressions, and movements both grand and subtle; this is where the subtext of life for me resides.