Portrait of Eric Burke

Artist. Software Engineer. Innovator.

Eric Burke is a photographic and digital artist located in O’Fallon, MO. His work is a blend of social commentary, fine art nude, erotic, and fetish.

As a software engineer in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Eric wrote and published three programming books with O’Reilly Media. Eric joined Square in 2010, where he co-created Square’s first Point of Sale application for Android phones, inventing a new algorithm for decoding credit card magnetic stripe data. He went on to lead Square’s growing mobile application development teams as an engineering manager in San Francisco before retiring in 2016.

As a fine art photographer, Eric taught photography classes at the renowned Shutterfest conference in 2022, 2023, and 2024. Known for light projection photography in particular, Eric pioneered many projection-related techniques, creating a free application called Projection Studio for Web to streamline projection photoshoots. His work is opinionated and bold. Stylistically, his images feature high-contrast black and white or are more cinematic with bright, saturated colors. His subjects do not “pose” for the camera; it’s more akin to acting out emotions and stories.

Eric’s fine art work can be found on his website at GenuineBurke.com. Photographic series like Form and Void, Hands, and Unseen Forms capture the human body in minimalist, abstract black and white. His Broken Dolls series explores societal challenges around human rights, body autonomy, and censorship through digital Photoshop composites. His bodyscape photography was featured at the Naughti Gras erotic art festival in 2019, and his Broken Dolls series was represented at Naughti Gras in 2023. His ongoing series, Dystopian Now, is somewhat of a continuation of Broken Dolls but takes a more analog style as a pushback against overly polished AI-generated images.