Lyle Gomes was born in 1954 in San Francisco. He began photographing seriously at the age of 20 and received both his B.A. (1978) and his M.A. (1980) in Art from San Francisco State University. He is both the recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and a Rockefeller Foundation residency, Bellagio, Italy. Inspired by the work of Czechoslovakian photographer Josef Sudek, Gomes began using the panoramic format in 1989. He achieves the elongated shape of his photographs by adapting his 4x5 field camera to the panoramic format. In 2005, the University of Virginia Press published this long-term project, Imagining Eden: Connecting Landscapes. The book includes sixty photographs made over a sixteen-year period from locations in America and Europe. These imaginative places, whether a city park, garden, cemetery, golf course, or military reservation, were created as an attempt at recovering a connection with nature lost with Eden. Photographs from Imagining Eden will be displayed at George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y.; University Michigan Museum of Art; and Triton Museum, Santa Clara, CA. The inspiration for his most recent project, Abstracting Place, occurred on Italyﾒs Lake Como during his 2002 Rockefeller residency. The abrupt juxtapositions of architecture and landscape combine visual tension with spatial ambiguity. The diptych effect is created purely through compositionﾗthey are ﾓstraightﾔ photographs. There is no combining of exposures or negatives. His work can be found in numerous permanent collections, that include: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; Dumbarton Oaks Collection, Washington D.C.; Cantor Center, Stanford University; Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego. Gomes continues to reside on the San Francisco peninsula where he heads the photography program at College of San Mateo.