Fauxliage, a newly published monograph by Annette LeMay Burke, chronicles the artist’s five-year project photographing cloaked cell phone towers embedded in the American West. 

Burke presents a careful and varied edit. She provides a range of visual information in terms of scale, light, angle of view, and perspective. Many of the images are vast and the viewer’s attention is drawn to the expanse of the space, with the tower performing only as one of many compelling visual elements. In other images, the compositional components bring the tower to prominence: its apparent function and absurdity at odds. Even still, several photographs exist in a liminal space between the subtle and the obvious. Without the context of the project’s parameters, one might evaluate such an image without paying significant attention to the cell phone tower. To an extent, this compromise touches on one of Burke’s larger points. These objects aren’t truly camouflaged. We aren’t asked to forget them in accordance with our daily lives. They are by us and for us by design. Each cell phone tower is a necessity as determined by our collective cultural desire for nonstop connectivity. 

So when we see these towers occupying spaces alongside ubiquitous environmental indicators; a fast-food drive-thru lane, a baseball field, a suburban neighborhood, a U-Haul parking lot, we can be reminded of our shared digital narrative. Cell phone towers help to provide us with the “world at our fingertips” – yet there is no denying the compromises of privacy embedded in regular engagement on social media, email, text, online shopping, sharing photos to the Cloud, and so forth. Burke’s images remind us that our technological desires are not without repercussions. In many images she gives us the option to look away, or to overlook precise content, but there’s no denying that this body of work points to many larger, more pernicious issues at play in our current age of technology. 

The tone of the book is complex. I pick up on bleak reflections of our current digital age, but Burke’s sense of humor is also apparent in the sequence. It seems to me that the artist is at once acknowledging her own conflicting feelings of criticism, complicity, and hope. I can identify with this conundrum.  Burke lives in Silicon Valley. It must be impossible to escape the regional culture that presents brilliant ideas and technology “for the greater good” coupled with venture capitalism and adverse environmental or social effects. Burke has written about these objects eventually receding into the anachronistic realm of drive-ins and phone booths when their latest iterations are smaller, sleeker, and less visible. I appreciate the artist’s acknowledgement of these cell phone towers as symbolic objects, regardless of their long-spanning function. She presents her viewers with beautiful images of charged objects with which to reflect on our own engagement with our modern digital systems.

Buy the book here

Details:

• Fauxliage by Annette LeMay Burke is published by Daylight Books
• Photography © Annette LeMay Burke
• Published May 2021
• Paper over Board, 10 x 10 in / 112 pages / 60 Color
• ISBN 9781942084983
• List Price: $45.00
• http://atelierlemay.com
• https://daylightbooks.org/products/fauxliage