hill country blues band Ripe Red Apple and continues making photographs. She is currently focusing on large format color film portraits of people in their natural environments.
"I have always given a lot of importance to the private lives people live. Each person has their own intense history and circumstance that is unknown to others. Where I once focused on politics, I now focus on the individual. Portraits show a person in a way that only pausing time can do, giving us the time and space to recognize ourselves in strangers. When we do this, we give them meaning, give their lives meaning, and replace our socio-economic ignorance with humanism."
Gaia Lyle was born in Santa Monica in 1988. Raised in San Diego, CA, Gaia left the city at age 17 to study economics and contemporary Latin American political movements at Smith College. However, a year later she left her text books to learn from the ground up, traveling the United States without money: walking, hitchhiking and hopping freight trains. The kindness, hardship, vulnerability and comraderie she encountered feeds the humanist intention of her photographs.
In 2008 Gaia moved to Valparaíso, Chile, where she lived as a blues singer with her now-husband, Gonzalo Villa. When an 8.8 earthquake shook the city, her father lent her a camera and she began making pictures of the colorful town.
Upon returning to San Diego in 2010, Gaia studied Photography at Grossmont Community College, where Professor and photographer Paul Turounet emboldened her desire to show the world as it is, unabashed. Before completing the program, however, Gaia moved with her husband to Portland, Oregon, where she sings with her