Lisa Sorgini’s latest project centres on family and climate catastrophe. The result is both intimate and expansive.
Photography Lisa Sorgini
Words Helen Anderson
‘MY awareness of the future shifted when I had my first child,” says Lisa Sorgini. It was 2015, and her sense of unease grew as words such as “unprecedented” and “climate crisis” accumulated around her and her baby.
After her second child was born, she brought her newborn son home during the 2019 bushfires, the air thick with smoke. “We’d moved back to the Northern Rivers, where I grew up, but I’d never thought of it as a bushfire zone. I had this tiny baby, and I was wondering if we could even go outside.”
As bushfires turned the world orange, she made photographs of what her sons, Ari and Elio, were experiencing. And again in 2022, when enormous floods devastated the region. “The flood really reinforced that these weather events are happening rapidly, breaking records – and it was happening in our backyards but at the same time everywhere,” Sorgini says.
The result is The Bushfire, The Flood, a body of work that documents two extreme weather events, the response of her children, and Sorgini’s challenges as a parent “balancing despair and needing to stay positive for the kids”.
“The main perspective of the project is presenting those two conflicting scenarios. Our children are going to have to navigate this world, and we need to ensure they’re educated but also not living in fear.”
A source of hope, too, is embedded in the project. Images of her oldest, Ari, sloshing in the mud, show him in his element. “He has such a reverence for nature. To see his passion, without any outside influence, is something that gives me a lot of hope. Maybe the positive in the climate challenge is the way children engage with it.”
A diptych from the project, showing flood debris alongside Ari in a mud pool, absorbed in play, won the 2025 Galah Regional Photography Prize, prompting the judges to applaud Sorgini’s examination of the effect of environmental catastrophe “through a very intimate lens”. The project then went to France as part of a major Australian exhibition at the annual Les Rencontres d’Arles photography festival – “a career highlight”, says Sorgini.
Just two months before the Galah prize was announced, an out-of-zone tropical low developed into Cyclone Alfred, throwing hundreds of thousands of people in south-east Queensland and the New South Wales north coast into turmoil. Sorgini witnessed another unprecedented weather event, with camera in hand.
Elio in the Bath (2019): “My son was only a few weeks old and appeared so vulnerable to me.” After the flood (2022): “This image was made at a local waterhole I’ve visited since I was a child. Seeing the way the flood altered the landscape permanently by clearing big trees and enormous rocks made me understand the strength of the floodwaters.” Summer Storm (2022): “The storms before the 2022 floods were more intense and frequent than any previous summers I could recall.” Black Summer Camping (2019): “My son Ari set up camp in his grandfather’s front yard in the hazy night light from the bushfires.” Photography by Lisa Sorgini.
In-Passing, Lisa Sorgini’s decade-long photographic project on motherhood, is published by Libraryman.
