Charles Joseph Lemay

Charles “Charlie” Joseph Lemay of Manchester, NH passed away peacefully in his sleep on May 22, 2025 from health complications stemming from his long-term battle with Lyme disease. He was 75 years old. Charlie was born on April 5, 1950 to Gerard Lemay and Priscilla Lemay (Leblanc). He was brother to Claudia Michael of Manchester, NH and Sylvia Fontaine of Wells, ME and father to Stephen Lemay and wife Kristine Kaneko of Palo Alto, CA, and Kathryn Lee (Lemay) and husband Brian Lee of West Roxbury, MA. He was beloved Pépère Charlie to Julian, Nora, Elliott, and Libby.

Charlie graduated from Manchester West High School in 1968. He majored in Fine Arts at Bowdoin College, class of 1972, where he married Donna Allen (Olivier/Lemay) of Manchester, NH. After a brief stint with a local architectural firm in Malden, MA, they moved back to New Hampshire to start their family and begin a private graphic design and photography business (Lemay Design & Photography). His work became iconic to the city of Manchester, with photography and graphic design featured in numerous places around the city from bank lobbies, grocery stores, to ski shops, brochures and magazines. Among his clients of note were Atomic Ski USA, Schonland's Foods, and the Catholic Medical Center, to name just a few. It was always exciting for his family and friends to become local celebrities after he recruited them to make cameos in his advertising work throughout the city.

Charlie was also very passionate about sharing his skills and life experience with others. In the early days of his career, he discovered that “teaching was the best way to remain a student.” He began to teach part-time at Notre Dame College in Manchester. There he taught Photography, Advertising Layout and Design, and Computer Graphics. For the last 20 years of Charlie’s career, his advertising work shifted to part-time as he became a full-time faculty member at St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH in 2000. At St. Paul’s, he developed a new curriculum to teach the Zone System, an artistic method of exposing and developing black and white film. He called this method “Zone Simple,” and continued teaching it with great success until he retired in 2019.

As an artist, Charlie embraced technology early on, learning new tools and bringing them into his fine art work. In 1995, he pioneered using digital collage to create narratives using elements from his own photographs as “characters.” These works appeared in many regional shows and won numerous national and international awards over the years.

One of Charlie’s greatest passions was traveling the world to photograph ancient ruins often accompanied by family members. Memorable expeditions include a trip to the Yucatan with his son Stephen, and to Egypt with his daughter Kathryn. He also traveled with friends or alone to Palenke, Malta, Turkey, Peru, and Bolivia. These trips were challenging, enlightening, and full of unexpected twists and turns, which is exactly how Charlie liked to live.

Charlie was an avid reader and in his heart, he always wanted to be a writer. He began gathering up thoughts he had written over the years and found that they corresponded well with his black and white fine art photography. This lead to several self-published books including a novella and two unfinished novels, “A Secret Society of Grandfathers,” and “An Anomalous Life.” His self-published written work and photo books have also won international recognition, including multiple PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris awards.

Charlie was a loving father, an inspiring thinker, a creative visionary, and a life-long learner and teacher. He will always be remembered as having a camera in his hand accompanied by a heavy camera bag over his shoulder. With a keen eye, he beautifully documented the life of his family and captured the beauty of the “enchanted world” that surrounded him…whether it was at family gatherings, on the ski slopes with the kids, perched on precariously high places, atop ancient ruins, in the woods of St. Paul’s, or, in the last phase of his life, walking through the halls of Evergreen Place where he was living. Charlie loved recounting to his grandchildren and friends the incredible stories of his youth and his fantastical adventures, sprinkled with nuggets of wisdom. He loved his family, photography, books, art, movies, counter culture, poetry, astrology, the works of John Keel & Steely Dan, The Red Sox, The Curse of Oak Island, tales of Camelot, Conan the Barbarian, and anything that challenged our view of the world.

Charlie saw the world differently and encouraged others to do the same. He taught us to think for ourselves, be ourselves, and “make the images,” that if not made “no one else will ever get to see.” He will be deeply missed by admiring friends, colleagues, students, and his cherished family.

A memorial gathering of family and friends will be held between 9am and noon on Saturday, May 31st at Phaneuf Funeral Home on 250 Coolidge Avenue, Manchester, NH 03102. Words of remembrance will be spoken at 11am and all are welcome to join.