Viva Jillian Gibb (11 September 1945 – 4 December 2017), earlier referred to as Jillian Gibb, was an Australian feminist photographer, printmaker, poster artist, activist, and social documentary practitioner active from 1974–2017.
Early life and education, 1945–1974 Viva Jillian Gibb was born on 11 September 1945 in Bobinawarrah, a small settlement approximately 30 km south-east of Wangaratta in rural Victoria. The youngest daughter of a livestock-farming family, she was, by her children's account, an animal-loving child somewhat out of context in her rural industry setting. An early art interest was photography.
Viva undertook a diploma of art at Wangaratta Technical College between 1961 and 1965 where in the mid-1950s metalsmith Stuart Devlin had taught and, with Jock Tomlinson, set up a progressive art curriculum that included some photography. One of Gibb's contemporaries there was naïve painter Lorna Chick.
Gibb then moved to Melbourne to study painting at the National Gallery Art School (1965–68), before completing printmaking studies at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) over 1973–74. At the VCA photography emerged as her primary medium, initiated through her incorporating old photographs into her silkscreen prints. Her craft as a printmaker carried directly into her photographic printing practice.
She graduated from the VCA in the same year as photographer Sue Ford, at a moment when women photographers in Australia were beginning to assert the personal and everyday as legitimate territory for artistic inquiry, which was a formative ethos in both artists' careers.
Documentary practice, 1975–1990 In 1975, Gibb moved to 64 Capel Street, West Melbourne, with her two children, Sybil and Rupert. She quickly established her first dedicated darkroom at 72 Capel Street. From this address, she began consistently to record the people and streets around her. She worked primarily with a Rolleiflex twin-lens medium-format camera and a large-format 4×5-inch Graflex Speed Graphic press camera, developing and printing her own silver gelatin prints. Her son Rupert later recalled that: 'she knew exactly how black she wanted her blacks to be and how bright her highlights were and knew her exposures so well that she was rarely wasteful with film'.Rupert Duffy, eulogy for Viva Gibb, December 2017
The community of West and North Melbourne was her main subject for nearly two decades, and some individuals are revisited: Vincenzo Lamberti next door at 62 Capel Street; Tommy and Maureen at 8 Hawke Street; Sammy at number 12. From 1980, she lived and worked at 10 Hawke Street — the address she retained until her death in 2017 — with her studio on Stanley Street sandwiched between a neighbour and what she described as the "bikie headquarters" squat at number 59. Her subjects ranged across the full social spectrum of the area: wharfies, labourers, market vendors, barbers and tobacconists, café owners, punk squatters, drag queens, single mothers, migrants, refugees, the elderly, and the homeless. As she wrote in the catalogue for the 1986 exhibition The Critical Distance: The people in my photographs are those who have survived at all odds — socially, racially, and economically — in our essentially bourgeois society; the lonely man next door, the old people who have lived in the area all their lives and are threatened with eviction, the homeless man whose only dream is to have a room of his own'.The directness, intimacy and ease visible in her portraits are evidence of her personal knowledge of her subjects. NGV catalogue contributor Jennie Boddington observed that: 'It is obvious that Gibb only works with people for whom she feels a strong sympathy and warm interest; her work is entirely free of clinical investigation'. Gibb herself was explicit about her method: "I don't really deal with people I don't know ... I only ask them for a photograph if I am interested in that person, if there is something in the whole story about them ... or some special feature, whether it is their beauty or their personality. Or they've had a really hard time or they've been poor or working hard all their life."
From early on, Gibb adopted a consistent portrait approach, prioritising mid or long shots with the subject captured in relation to their environment. By the 1980s her work showed increasing awareness of theoretical discourses around representation. In her 1980 survey 'Photography in the Australian Art Scene' in Art + Australia Christine Godden outlined the context:The personal is as much a subject for picture-making as the public issue. Robert Ashton, Godwin Bradbeer, Bill Henson, Leonie Reisberg and Jillian Gibb, for example, usually work in this area. Jill Gibb's long and intimate piece One year's work, 1980, is almost a visual diary. These tiny, dark photographs required the viewer's close attention. Godden is referring to Gibb's 1980 National Gallery of Victoria exhibition One Year's Work, in which photographs were presented as sequences of multiple images—examples now in the NGV collection—and she began incorporating text as a conceptual strategy. Boddington described the resulting works as: 'jewel-like pictures, made up of anything from one to ten small prints ... the words of the titles, understated but often highly allusive, fuse with the pictures to resonate their meaning'. Titles such as Not many of us left now, We had fun in those days, and It is the price of life suggest phrases expressed by the subject during photography sessions, heightening the sense of encounter between photographer, subject and viewer.
Capel Street For a period in the mid-1970s, writer Helen Garner and her daughter Alice lived with Gibb at 64 Capel Street. In her memoir contribution to the 2026 exhibition catalogue, Garner recalled the cramped but lively domestic arrangement: "We were single mothers. I had a daughter, she had a daughter and a son; we all moved in together". Helen Ennis identifies Gibb and Sue Ford as exceptional amongst women photographers of the period for having raised children while maintaining a continuous photographic practice. It was during this time that Garner wrote her debut novel Monkey Grip (1977). Garner recalled Gibb as a person of formidable practical and creative capability: "All I could do was write, but Viva was a country woman, a person of awesome practical skills". Garner described how Gibb had been "sinking deeply into her corner of our city, quietly absorbing it and its people into her artist's imagination, her historian's archive ... Her heart was open to the world she had chosen. She served it, she made it hers, and her work shows the profound sincerity of that love."
Both Gibb and Garner were engaged in closely related artistic projects from the same domestic space: Gibb through documentary photography, Garner through candid fiction. Curator Savannah Smith noted the shared sensibility, describing the "intimacy with place" that characterises both bodies of work — built through "local knowledge and the regular, routine movement through the spaces of one's life." By foregrounding the commonplace, both artists broke with fine art and literary traditions about which subjects warranted representation. Boddington commended Gibb's "strong and confident sense of identity" as not "borrowed from foreign sources but formed from the artist's own conviction and sense of things" — a quality that placed her among the first generation of Australian artists to shake off what critics called the "cultural cringe".
Political posters, 1974–1990s Parallel to her photography, and inspired by the direct-action posters of the Atelier Populaire of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the civil unrest of 1968, to which Gibb had a visceral response, was her series of raw, expressionist protest posters produced from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s using screen-print, woodcut and linocut: In September 2008 correspondence with Olga Tsara, Gibb explained: "The technique I used most [in screen-printing] was painting on water-based filler which gave a positive image which I could do very quickly, then print them by myself in a little studio ... and then paste them all up [in the streets] at night by myself again. The whole thing taking about two days" She used access facilities at Redletter Press, sometimes with the help of Wendy Black, taking screens to her own studio to print. The efficiency of the printing technique responded to the urgency of the political moment, as Gibb described: "Those were very conservative days and there was a groundswell of artists, writers and in all areas of the arts that were wanting a change in Government's racist, sexist and speciesist attitudes of a very complacent society".
Gibb's earliest acknowledged poster, CIA Assassin (1974), was a direct quotation of the Atelier Populaire's Frey (1968), adapted to comment on American covert operations in the developing world. Among the most enduring posters were those championing animal rights — Alice in Wonderland (1982), This Little Piggy Went to Market (1982), and Why? Man's Monstrous Crime. Vivisection (c. 1980) — alongside anti-nuclear works such as Uranium Shares Boom (1982). A poster of particular personal significance was Pensioners: The Final Solution (1978), based on the hospital room in which her own father was dying, a comment on the inadequacies of the public health system.
Popondetta 1943, Diggers Hanged 34 Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels, Lest We Forget (1978) addressed an act of colonial violence during the Second World War. In May 1978 Barry Jones had revealed in Federal Parliament that during the Second World War Lieutenant-General Sir Edmund Herring had confirmed death sentences on 22 Papuans convicted of handing over seven Anglican missionaries to the Japanese, which Jones called "the darkest secret in modern Australian history".Jones, A Thinking Reed, pp. 96–97. The Papuans had been convicted of offences including murder and treason. Herring claimed that they had been treated fairly under the conventions and circumstances applicable in wartime to defend his "clear conscience about it".Innes, Prue, "A full Life of Service in Khaki and Silk", The Age (Melbourne), 6 January 1982; accessed 23 March 2026. Gibb was so moved by the case that she pasted a copy of her poster outside Herring's Toorak house.
Critic Sasha Grishin noted the response to one of Gibb's posters shown in a 1984 exhibit, seen by more than 5,000 visitors, across two venues in Canberra:The ability to offend through art is always one criterion through which to measure its social relevance. Already, 'Truth Rules ... OK?' has run into some difficulties with the bold poster by Jillian Gibb entitled, Israel's final solution, ordered to be taken down by the Woden Shopping Square authorities. In an exhibition of more than 100 items, all of which set out to challenge the so-called status quo, it is not difficult to predict opposition from some of the defenders of this status quo!Notably, despite her active participation in the demonstrations and campaigns that defined Melbourne's political life in the 1970s — the Vietnam moratorium and anti-apartheid protests, women's liberation, anti-vivisection, Aboriginal land rights, anti-nuclear movements — and her production of posters expressing such stances, Gibb chose not to photograph these events. Her political engagement in photography remained intimate and personal: people she knew, not anonymous crowds, though like Rennie Ellis, she photographed elderly veterans at Anzac Day.
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