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Fauxliage
"We have to contend with these manufactured landscapes."
Photo by Annette LeMay Burke
Paula Mejía in conversation with photographer Annette LeMay Burke.
The squat Washingtonia filifera, the fan palm, is the only tree of its kind native to the southwestern United States. This means the ubiquitous spindly palms that exist in arid stretches of Southern California, Nevada, and Arizona are all transplants, brought there to juxtapose with coral sunsets, signal a sense of exclusivity, and—by constantly lurching towards wherever the wind might blow that day—typify a breezy je ne sais quoi way of being.
But over the last thirty-something years, clusters of fake cell towers gussied up to look like skydusters and date palms have cropped up alongside the real deal. Depending on the specific landscape in which they’re placed—and who’s cashing in on them—these cell towers might also be dressed to resemble saguaros or pines, hidden in the shape of a cross on church grounds, or even tucked into the corner of a preschool parking lot.
The proliferation of fake cell phone towers has long fascinated the Silicon Valley-based photographer Annette LeMay Burke, who began documenting them in earnest over a decade ago while traveling around the southwest. She’s since culled her works of photography into a book, Fauxliage, that tracks the unnerving presence and odd kitsch of these unnatural landmarks. In doing so, she explores the controversy of large-scale landscape manipulation, and asks discerning viewers to consider “what we're willing to exchange for our connectivity.”
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Paula Mejía: You write in Fauxliage that you first started noticing these fake cell towers in the early 2000s in Silicon Valley, and you found them humorous. What amused you about them?
Annette LeMay Burke: Well, they were just so obviously fake. And they're supposed to fool the viewer. I've talked to a lot of people about them in the area, who were totally unaware that they existed. So obviously, it's working for some people. They call attention to themselves, to me. I can find them anywhere. There was one on a freeway not that far from my house, just poking over behind the sound wall. I’m like, “What is that doing there?” A lot of them in the Bay Area have been replaced with just straight up cell towers.
PM: Why is that—to cut costs?
ALB: It adds, I don't know, $150,000 to the infrastructure? Because they have to make the bases stouter to hold all the branches and construct all the branches. But they will often, regardless of the cost, add the disguise just to get it approved quicker. If it is a cost issue in the Bay Area, no one cares. Everyone just wants five bars of service on their phone.
If you have land in the right spot, then you can lease it to the cell phone companies, and they'll pay a couple grand a month for that. There are actually people to help you negotiate the contract; it is a whole cottage industry. The disguises are getting better and better. They're often hidden behind, like, the facade of a strip mall. You don't even know they're there. Anyone who owns their property loves this. So churches are a big one. Or municipalities. Schools, even. It’s just free money.
PM: I was taken by your images of the crosses with the cell phone tower embedded in them. Saguaros, too. It made me wonder what is it about humanity's stubborn insistence to make something that's so obviously fake exist in this way. What do you make of that?
ALB: If it works for some people, then they're being effective. But since it doesn't work for me, it's hard to wrap my head around it. It's like they just want to sneak it by so no one notices. But yet we have to contend with these manufactured landscapes. I think kids today would be looking at them and think that's a normal thing, and I don't think they're normal.
I mean, we're all used to telephone lines and high tension wires and even cell towers themselves. But the fake ones…it adds this little kind of nefariousness. Like, “why do they feel the need to disguise that? Are there health issues?” We know they collect all the data. The fact that it's disguised makes it seem like they're trying to hide something.
The fact that it's disguised makes it seem like they're trying to hide something.
PM: I wonder if there’s a connection to Disneyland in some way here. Especially since it’s influenced so much of landscape architecture and the way plaster is used.
ALB: You know, there is a connection with the cell phone towers. I believe that one of the companies that created some of those landscapes for Disneyland was the first to do the disguised cell tower that looked like a tree.
PM: As you started traveling around California, Nevada, and other places photographing the fake cell towers, did you ever get any weird responses? Or people shooing you away?
ALB: Oh sure, yeah. All the time. It's kind of disarming when I tell people what I'm doing. They're like, “Oh, you're just crazy. No one wants to be here taking a picture of that.” And then they generally leave me alone. Maybe 20 years ago, when I was first getting into photography, I could go anywhere with my camera and no one bothered me, including parks. But now, I'm like the evil person with the camera.
Society has changed so much. And how we view photography because of the internet, I'm sure. Being older probably makes a difference. But people think I'm taking real estate pictures. I’ve been kicked out of a few places. I try not to trespass, but if there's not a fence I may wander onto some property.
I try not to trespass, but if there's not a fence I may wander onto some property.
PM: How has this project impacted your practice as a photographer?
ALB: It’s really helped me a lot. It's forced me to really work a subject. I may see it driving by on the freeway and then pull over to take it, but that's not always the best shot. So I really have slowed down, gotten in the zone, and thought about shooting it from many perspectives, angles. Even when I'm asked to leave, I will do it.
[Once] I was out near Coachella, shooting one. And I went out pretty early in the morning. This was after the iPhone had just started to enable that “find my phone” feature. And I happened to have been traveling with my husband that time, and I just went off on my own to do that. We turned on that feature literally the day before. Anyway, I go do my shoot, I come back to see him for breakfast, and I realize I don't have my phone. I had inadvertently dropped it right next to one of these cell towers. It just fell out of my pocket. Because it was right there, the pings actually led us right back to the phone. That was kind of a little meta moment. I was glad that there was a cell tower.
PM: I also learned in your book that these towers don't have eminent domain.
ALB: You really can't fight them. And they've excluded any discussion of health issues from the argument, too. So that's why you find them in schools. I met with a reviewer once from Russia, and she was just baffled that they had them at schools. She was like, “That's illegal in our country. We can't do that. Don't you know it's unsafe?” I'm like, “Hey, I just take the pictures here.”
PM: One of your photos shows people doing maintenance on a fake cell tower tree. What surprised you about observing that?
ALB: So as the [trees] age, and the needles fall off and they look horrible, often they will choose to reinvest in them and have all new fiberglass branches and new fronds. That's the part I find surprising. So that tower must have been there for at least 10 years, and they're going to do it again. There's one outside of Vegas—that’s the one I have in my book that they're refurbing. There's nothing else around there but this tree.
PM: You also started collecting the fallen “leaf” samples to make your own UV cyanotype prints?
ALB: Yeah, I really enjoyed doing that actually. I'm still collecting different styles of leaves, so they keep adding new things to it. Now that we have plastic leaves, you can't see any of the veining through them. I just thought it was a great comment on the evolution of technology, and the evolution of photography. Because the first woman to ever illustrate a book photographically was Anna Atkins in the 1840s. She was a botanist cataloging British algae, and used this new cyanotype technique to do her book.
So it was a riff on that. She had beautiful handwritten genus and species on there. And when I do it, I use a digital label maker, and make up genus and species like foliage camoflouras, something to signify the different kinds of foliage.
I use a digital label maker, and make up genus and species like foliage camoflouras
PM: Is there a cell tower that has especially made an impression on you?
ALB: I think the saguaros are the coolest ones. There's varying degrees of craftsmanship that goes into them. Those look really good. They're replicating the little bird holes, and they're airbrushing on the spots and the crenulated features of the outside. They’re kind of the right height for a saguaro, so they blend in a little better.
With 5G, I think they might be going away eventually. Not tomorrow. But that technology is only going to need one kind of big cell tower, like those, in a larger area. And then there'll be numerous smaller 5G ones everywhere else, like the fat light poles and stuff like that. So maybe I'm marking a time in history, too. 🌴
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