PHOTO LIVE with Kate Disher-Quill and Phoebe Powell

25.2.21

PHOTO LIVE features artists premiering new projects that occupied public spaces during the Festival.

PHOTO LIVE is a series of artist conversations that took place throughout PHOTO 2021 addressing the social and cultural role photography plays in our lives. Curators, academics and practitioners discussed a range of issues from identity, community and belonging to human rights and social justice.

Artists Kate Disher-Quill and Phoebe Powell to discuss their compelling and emotive project, Surge, with Mary Parker, Director, Communications & Creative of the Metro Tunnel Creative Program.


Evolving over months of lockdown restrictions as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across Melbourne in 2020, Surge is a collective reflection of the nuanced and at times confronting experiences encountered by a diverse range of healthcare professionals. In referencing the dichotomy between the clinical protocols of the pandemic and the vulnerability of the human experience, Surge combines the medical with the personal, to reveal and acknowledge our capacity to endure.


In partnership with MPavilion.

Founding Partners
  • Bowness Family Foundation
  • Naomi Milgrom Foundation
Major Government Partners
  • City of Melbourne Arts Grants Program
  • Creative Victoria
Major Partners
  • Maddocks

PHOTO Australia respectfully acknowledges the traditional custodians of the lands upon which we work and live, and the rich and diverse Indigenous cultures across what is now called Australia. For over 60,000 years, Indigenous arts and culture have thrived on this sacred land, and we honour Elders and cultural leaders past and present. This was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.

01–24 March