Where the method comes from
The requirement nobody names is the first one to disappear.
When pressure builds, priorities narrow.
What is explicitly named, understood and given equal weight has a chance of surviving. What is assumed, implied or treated as secondary is usually the first thing to go.
Lyle learned that long before he became a photographer.
The same pattern appeared in three different contexts, a decade apart, in three different countries. The requirement that is not deliberately recognised is the first to disappear.
Afghanistan, 2009
The 2009 Afghan Presidential and Provincial Council elections needed a credible outcome.
The international community had invested heavily in making that possible. Credibility depended not simply on polling stations opening, but on people being able to reach them, pass through security and participate. Around 38 per cent of registered voters were women.
The operational problem was specific.
Kabul, 2009
In many communities, women could not pass through a security cordon unless they were searched by a woman, in private. That meant female searchers and polling staff had to be recruited locally, often in provinces where volunteering for either role carried real personal risk.
Lyle was Military Assistant to the Chief of the Election Task Force at ISAF Headquarters in Kabul.
Each week, he participated in a United Nations-hosted meeting where the United Nations Assistance Mission reiterated its concerns about women’s participation. His job was to carry those concerns back into ISAF support and security planning, and into command.
Women’s access was not a peripheral issue. It was a standing requirement.
It was raised and reiterated every week because operational pressure has a habit of stripping away anything that has not been given sufficient priority.
Naming it kept it in the plan. Not as a concession to be defended, but as a condition of the outcome being worth the investment.
That stayed with him.
What is given equal priority is more likely to survive pressure. What is given space only as a courtesy is the first thing to lose it.
Air Force, 2015–2017
A decade later, the context was different. The problem was familiar.
Body armour, equipment and nutrition had often been designed around the average male frame, then issued to women expected to perform in it.
The system wasn’t necessarily failing. It was working as designed, for someone else.
As Director of Plan Jericho, Lyle championed fit-for-purpose solutions designed around the people who actually needed to use them, including solutions specifically designed for women in the Australian Defence Force.
The lesson was the same. If the requirement isn’t explicitly recognised, the system will default to the person it was originally designed around.
The lesson wasn’t simply about access. It was about what happens when something is given space without being given equal priority.
Japan, 2022–2023
Japan is where Lyle first picked up a camera at a sporting event.
He started photographing varsity basketball. The boys' games generally had full stands. The girls' games did not. Outside of major divisional finals, the difference was consistent.
The pattern was visible from the sideline.
The girls' games weren't invisible. They simply occupied less of the visual and social space around the programme.
Lyle changed his shooting priority. When there was a choice, he went to the girls' games.
Not because the boys' games mattered less.
Because the imbalance was visible and someone had to choose to see it differently.
Lyle’s Lens
In sport, the equivalent space is visual.
Sport has spent decades developing visual systems around the competitions, athletes, audiences and commercial models it already understood. Women’s elite sport has grown enormously within those systems, and the opportunity now emerging is bigger than simply increasing its visibility.
Its scale, audience, commercial value and investment potential are changing what that visual space needs to do.
The opportunity is no longer simply to give women’s sport more visibility within an existing visual system. It is to understand what women’s sport now needs its visual presence to achieve, and design for that deliberately.
Who needs to be visible.
What needs to be communicated.
Which stories need to be told.
What sponsors need to see.
What prospective athletes need to believe.
What audiences need to connect with.
And what the organisation needs its imagery to do beyond the final whistle.
That’s the space Lyle’s Lens is designed to work in.
Not adapting an existing visual system to women’s sport. Designing the visual space around what women’s sport is becoming.