In the luminous hush of Lisa Sorgini’s photographs, time seems to thicken and slow. The Australian–Italian artist builds her work on this stillness, letting everyday moments—often of motherhood—unfold like a remembered dream.
Sorgini’s images do not announce themselves. They do not ask for permission or raise their voices. Instead, they hover on the edge of the familiar—an infant wrapped in muslin, a woman caught in profile near a windowpane, soft shadows playing across bare shoulders—and then proceed to rearrange what we thought we knew about caregiving, womanhood, and intimacy.
Lisa Sorgini’s work carries a sense of poetry balanced by rigor and precision, capturing something both ancient and invisible all at once. Raised on Australia’s east coast, Sorgini came to photography somewhat circuitously, after studying fine art and working as a winemaker. Her pivot into visual storytelling came with the birth of her own child—a life event that, for many, heralds a retreat from creative practice. For Sorgini, it became the aperture through which she began to see the world anew.
In Behind Glass, the series that first brought her global attention during the COVID‑19 lockdowns, mothers and children are pictured through windowpanes, separated from the viewer by glass and circumstance. What could have been simply elegiac is, instead, charged with intimacy: a mother’s gaze steady, a child’s hand pressed to the glass, the light bouncing just so.
Her later series—Thick Like Water, In‑Passing, and The Bushfire, the Flood—extend that visual lexicon, moving from the interior toward the elemental. The domestic, for Sorgini, is not a constraint but a crucible. In In‑Passing, the loss of her mother coincides with the arrival of new life, the photographs inhabiting the blurry interstice between grief and rebirth. It is, in many ways, her most vulnerable body of work—unsentimental, deeply felt, and wholly original.
Unlike many photographers of the domestic realm, Sorgini resists nostalgia. Her palette, while warm, does not flatter. Her compositions—tight, often headless—deny the viewer the comfort of easy iconography. This refusal is part of what makes her work so resonant. It speaks to the truths we don’t always articulate: the physicality of mothering, the loneliness within intimacy, the sensory overload of care.
Her recognition has come steadily, and with substance. A finalist for the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize and a recipient of LensCulture’s Critics’ Choice, she has exhibited in London, Melbourne, Arles, and Landskrona, with work held in several public and private collections. But accolades have never been the point. In this way, her photographs feel less like statements and more like offerings—delicate, defiant, and filled with the quiet power of someone paying very close attention.
