2024 Member's Show Best in Show Award

From the series "Memory Building"

Statement from Annette LeMay Burke:
"My parents died within a few months of each other. They lived in the same house for 60 years, from the day they were married until their deaths. Once they were gone, I was left with my grief, memories of our lives together, and all their possessions, including a well-organized archive of family photos.

In my series, Memory Building, I projected those vernacular photographs onto the surfaces of my childhood home in the same locations that they were originally made and rephotographed the scene. By fusing photos from the past onto the present-day walls, I unearthed six decades of engrained memories and captured my family’s vanishing presence that once permeated our mid-century suburban home—the container for so much of my personal history.

Constructing the projected tableaus made the memories more substantive for me, provided solace for my grieving and created a new family pictorial legacy for future generations. 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."

Annette LeMay Burke Bio:
Annette LeMay Burke is an award-winning photographic artist and Northern California native who resides in the innovative hub of Silicon Valley. With a background in geology from the University of California, Berkeley, Burke's lens has long been finely attuned to the ever-evolving contours of the western landscape. Formerly immersed in a career in high-tech, Burke now channels her passion into her artistic practice, often exploring the presence of technology as both a disruptor and unifier within the landscape, echoing the complexities of the modern human experience.

Burke's series, Memory Building, was selected for LensCulture Critics' Choice 2024. She received the Best In Show award in Colorado Photographic Arts Center’s 2024 Annual Members’ Show. In 2023, Burke was a finalist for the UK’s Earth Photo competition and exhibited at London's Royal Geographical Society and multiple Forestry England sites, she was named the International Runner-Up for the Australian Geographic Environmental Award at the Head On Photo Festival and exhibited along the Bondi Beach Promenade in Sydney, and she was a finalist in the Hellerau Portrait Photography Award in Dresden, Germany. Her work was selected as a winner of Photolucida’s 2022 Critical Mass Top 50. In 2021, she was awarded first place in the Lenscratch Vernacular Photography Exhibition, won the Imago Lisboa Photography Festival in Portugal, and was a semi-finalist for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s The Outwin 2022: American Portraiture Today in Washington DC.

Burke’s work is exhibited widely throughout the US and internationally at institutions such as Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Candela Gallery in Virginia, Griffin Museum of Photography in Massachusetts, Los Angeles Center for Photography, Oceanside Museum of Art in California, Museum of Nature in Cantabria, Spain, and Association of Photographers in London. 

Her images have been featured in The New York Times, L.A. Times, The Times (London), Hyperallergic, Sierra Club Magazine, Newsweek Japan, Elle Decor Italy, Fraction, All About Photo, KATALOG, Dezeen, EXIT Image and Culture, The Riv Magazine 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). Her book is included in over 45 libraries worldwide.

Burke’s monograph, Fauxliage: Disguised Cell Phone Towers of the American West, was published by Daylight Books in 2021. Ann M. Jastrab, Executive Director of the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, California, contributed the forward.

Burke is one of eleven female photographers who created the traveling exhibition Memory is a Verb: Exploring Time and Transience. Represented in this body of work are the universal concepts of loss, mortality, and legacy, and the exploration of what inspires us to seek solace and reexamine our histories. The exhibition was shown in four US galleries and museums in 2023.