Annette LeMay Burke: Memory Building
After my parents died within a few months of each other, I was left to navigate my grief alone, surrounded by memories of our lives together and by their material possessions, including a well-organized archive of family photographs. They had lived in the same mid-century suburban house since their wedding day. For sixty years, their lives unfolded within its walls, a place steeped in our shared history.
In Memory Building, I project vernacular photographs from this archive onto the surfaces of my childhood home, aligning them with the original locations where they were made. By rephotographing these layered scenes, I explore how memory remains embedded in place, with walls and furnishings serving as silent witnesses to our lives.
These projected tableaux collapse past and present, creating space for reflection and solace amid loss. As the house was prepared for new occupants, I grappled with saying goodbye to the traces of my parents’ lives that had filled it for so long. Making this work became a way to honor the home’s role in shaping my personal history and to navigate the bittersweet process of letting go.
Welcome
Rumpus Room
Chuck's Corvette
Christening Day
Dining Room Dinghy
My Playhouse
Birthday Party
The Hearth
Girl Scouts
Garage Workshop
Snuggies, Remote and Buck
Baking Cookies
Bio
Annette LeMay Burke is a photographic artist and Northern California native who is based in Silicon Valley. With a degree in geology from the University of California, Berkeley, she has long been attuned to the shifting contours of the western landscape. Before devoting herself to fine-art photography, she worked in the high-tech industry. The combination of those experiences allows her to bring a unique combination of scientific insight and creative vision to her photography. She is interested in how our environment changes over time and the telltale artifacts, both tangible and temporal, that are left behind. Her images explore how infrastructures — technological, geological, architectural, and domestic — reshape the land and mirror the complexities of contemporary life.
Her photographs have been featured in more than a hundred exhibitions across the globe. She was named to the Critical Mass Top 50 in 2022 (for her Memory Building series) and received LensCulture Critics’ Choice recognition in 2024 and 2022. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Times (UK), Boston Globe, Australian Geographic, Sierra Club Magazine, and Il Fotografo.
Her monograph, Fauxliage: Disguised Cell Phone Towers of the American West, was published by Daylight Books in 2021.