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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.

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 undertook a diploma of art at Wangaratta Technical College between 1961 and 1965. 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, when women photographers in Australia turned to the personal and everyday for artistic inquiry

In 1975, Gibb moved to 64 Capel Street, West Melbourne, with her two children, Sybil and Rupert and established her darkroom at 72 Capel Street. She photographed the people and streets around her with a Rolleiflex twin-lens medium-format camera and a large-format 4×5-inch Graflex Speed Graphic press camera, and the community of West and North Melbourne was her main subject for nearly two decades; wharfies, labourers, market vendors, barbers and tobacconists, café owners, punk squatters, drag queens, single mothers, migrants, refugees, the elderly, and the homeless. In the catalogue for the 1986 exhibition The Critical Distance she wrote:
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’.
Of the 1980 National Gallery of Victoria exhibition One Year’s Work, curator 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,” and her consistent portrait approach, prioritised mid or long shots with the subject captured in relation to their environment, and often presented as sequences of multiple images incorporating text; phrases spoken by the subject.. 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, referencing One Year’s Work, 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 like a visual diary; tiny, dark photographs requiring the viewer’s close attention, which Boddington described as: 'jewel-like pictures.”

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.”

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: “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 accessed facilities at Redletter Press, assisted by Wendy Black, taking screens to her own studio to print. The efficient printing technique responded to the political urgency of Gibb’s challenges to the “Government’s racist, sexist and speciesist attitudes of a very complacent society”. Her earliest, CIA Assassin (1974), adapted Atelier Populaire’s Frey (1968), to comment on American covert operations in the developing world, and her other posters championed animal rights and the anti-nuclear movement (Uranium Shares Boom,1982).
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” while Herring claimed a “clear conscience about it”. Gibb, so moved by the case, pasted a copy of her poster outside Herring’s 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!”

Gibb was part of a significant cohort of social-documentary photographers working in Melbourne’s inner north during the 1970s and 1980s, which included Sue Ford, Micky Allan, Ponch Hawkes, Ruth Maddison, Janina Green, Virginia Fraser, Helen Grace, Virginia Coventry, and Sandy Edwards. Photographer Ruth Maddison, who met Gibb in the 1970s through shared social circles, recalled her in the 2026 exhibition catalogue:
Viva was art school trained in painting and printmaking, and subsequently photography became the main area of her practice. I was in awe of her ability to make powerful work across three different media.” Gibb, Allan, Maddison and Green all applied hand-colouring to their photographs, consciously reviving with a feminist intent, techniques that had been developed by predominantly women retouchers in photography studios for over a century. Maddison credited Gibb’s work and friendship as directly supportive and inspiring at the outset of her own photographic career in 1976:
“we all embraced feminism and the belief that everyday life was worthy of artistic consideration, and we were mutually supportive as we were bringing it into our work in similar and different ways.”
The group articulated the broad concerns of second-wave feminism, responding to the twin maxims of the time — 'the personal is political’ and 'think global, act local’ — and to postmodern critiques of the documentary tradition. Ennis notes in this regard: “the importance of agreement – indeed, of empathy – between photographer and subject is paramount in these works, regardless of the setting. Take as examples Viva Gibb’s photograph of Australian writer Helen Garner, newspaper in hand”. As Niels Hutchison recalls, Gibb’s house and studio became a “social hub” for “artists of all kinds, from the Pram Factory or the nascent Circus Oz.”

In 1982 the National Gallery of Australia acquired Gibb photographs through the Philip Morris fund among those of 107 significant Australian photographers of whom 25 were women, including Gibb’s associates.
In the late 1980s, Gibb travelled to South Africa to document people’s lives in towns and villages under apartheid, where she photographed David Goldblatt and the markets and sacred sites for a series titled Of Gods and Animals, commenting on the contrast between spiritual traditions and lived realities.
Returning to Australia, she was struck by the lack of photographic training opportunities for Aboriginal women and approached the Victorian Women’s Trust for funding to support a photography cadetship program. The first recipients were Maree Clarke and Kim Kruger — a practical act of mentorship that reflected her long-held beliefs about equitable cultural access. In 1990, she participated in a Koori Women’s photography project for the Victorian Women’s Trust, and a resulting exhibition, We two are watching (photography by Maree Clarke, Kim Kruger, Sonja Hodge, and Gibb), was shown at Art Moves, 387 Little Bourke Street, Melbourne, in 1991.
Gibb had also, from the mid-1970s, attended multicultural religious events and become concerned that these were of important historical significance that was going undocumented. She noted that “Australia as a whole seemed to have little idea of the wealth of culture embedded in religion and religious ceremonies.”[15] This motivated The Way: Religious Ceremonies in Victoria, which became her last substantial photographic series (begun in the 1990s). It documented the formal ceremonies, festivals, dances and processions of multicultural communities — Anglican, Byzantine Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Nestorian, Protestant, and multiple branches of Catholicism, as well as Buddhist, Baha’i, Hindu and Muslim communities.
During this period, Gibb conducted photography workshops, one of which inspired First Nations artist-photographer Destiny Deacon.
Gibb’s photographic practice diminished around 2000, with the digital turn in photography to which she never adapted.

Gibb resided in her home at 10 Hawke Street, North Melbourne, until her death. She donated a large part of her archive — 412 black-and-white large-format gelatin silver photographs, 11 cibachromes and 37 posters — to the State Library of Victoria’s Picture Collection. She also continued to participate sporadically in exhibition and publication projects.
In 2017, following a terminal diagnosis, Gibb spent her final months painting intensively. Ruth Maddison, who saw her at her last exhibition at Mario’s Café in Fitzroy in 2017, described the work: “Beautiful, vibrant, tender paintings, all painted in that last year of her life”. She died on 4 December 2017. Maddison concludes her memoir of Gibb with the words: “I do see Viva — her thick, henna-red hair — and I hear her big laugh, every time I see any of her work.”

Gibb’s photographs, most donated by her family, are held in private, and major public, collections across Australia.

Writers:

James McArdle

Date written:

2026

Last updated:

2026