Melbourne’s City Gallery will present On The Street Where I Live: Viva Gibb’s portrait of North and West Melbourne – a landmark exhibition celebrating the work of Melbourne artist and social documentary photographer Viva Jillian Gibb (1945–2017).
Opening 12 March, this exhibition, curated by Savannah Smith of the City of Melbourne’s Art and Heritage Collection team, marks the largest presentation of Gibb’s work in more than 30 years. The exhibition features never before seen material, including a selection of the artist’s photo albums, and will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue featuring contributions by Ruth Maddison and Helen Garner.
In 2025, the Melbourne Art Trust received a significant donation: more than 200 black-and-white silver gelatin prints by Viva Gibb, generously gifted by the artist’s children, Sybil Gibb and Rupert Duffy. Taken between the mid-1970s and early 1990s, these photographs create a vivid, compassionate portrait of life in North and West Melbourne at a moment of profound social and urban transformation.
Taking its title from one of Gibb’s original photo albums, On The Street Where I Live draws from this remarkable donation to showcase over 200 prints, offering an unparalleled, long-form study of an inner-city community seen through the eyes of one of Australia’s most perceptive documentary photographers.
“Viva Gibb’s distinct and empathetic representation of urban life reveals the sophisticated practice of an artist who cared deeply for the community around her. Her images capture the character, resilience and warmth of the people who lived and worked in Melbourne’s inner city during the fervent decades of the late twentieth century. We’re thrilled to reintroduce her work to the public and honour the remarkable legacy she left behind,” said curator Savannah Smith.
Across two decades, Gibb lived and worked in West Melbourne, photographing the people, streets and social fabric that defined her everyday surroundings. Her images trace the narrow radial streets around her homes and studios on Capel Street, Hawke Street and Stanley Street, extending across Victoria Street into North Melbourne. No other photographer has documented this area with such intimacy, depth or duration.
Guided by a strong socio-political conscience and a deep compassion for others, Gibb turned her lens toward those whose voices were often overlooked with photographs of workers and labourers, immigrants and refugees, the elderly, LGBTQ+ community, single mothers, homeless and marginalised individuals, children, family, neighbours, local businesses and friends.
During the late 1970s, Gibb shared a house on Capel Street with celebrated Australian writer Helen Garner, who was at the time writing her seminal debut novel Monkey Grip (1977). The two artists lived alongside the very community that both their works would, in different ways, chronicle – Gibb through her sympathetic documentary practice, Garner through her candid fictionalisation of Melbourne’s inner-city counterculture.
Their shared domestic and creative environment fostered a spirit of observation, engagement and deep attentiveness to the lives unfolding around them. Garner’s enduring interest in the complexities of urban relationships resonates strongly with Gibb’s photographic commitment to portraying the everyday with honesty, dignity and warmth.
From religious rituals to street festivals, countercultural movements to everyday domestic moments, Gibb created a democratic portrait of urban life – one that foregrounds dignity, connection and the complexities of change.
Working with both a Rolleiflex medium format camera and a 4×5-inch Graflex Speed Graphic, Gibb developed and printed all her own work. Her refined skills produced what NGV curator Jennie Boddington described in 1983 as “some of the richest work being done in this country,” noting the warmth and empathy embedded in her images.
This exhibition reassembles Gibb’s movements through the neighbourhood, grouping photographs by location and recurring subjects to echo her ongoing relationships – returning to the same faces, the same corners, the same unfolding stories.
Born in Bobinawarrah, Victoria in 1945, Gibb trained as a painter and printmaker before photography became her primary medium. She studied at Wangaratta Technical College, the National Gallery Art School, and the Victorian College of the Arts, completing her formal studies in the mid-1970s. Her photographs were first exhibited at Melbourne’s George Paton Gallery in 1978, followed by solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria (1980) and the Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide (1981, 1991).
Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Gibb participated in significant group exhibitions nationwide, including at the National Gallery of Australia (1983), Tin Sheds Gallery (1979), Artspace Sydney (1983), and The Photographer’s Gallery, Melbourne (1986). After decades of relative obscurity, her work returned to public view in 2019 at the Museum of Australian Photography.
Her photographs are held in major public collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, Museum of Australian Photography, State Library of Victoria, Art Gallery of NSW, National Gallery of Australia, Australian Parliament House Art Collection, Murray Art Museum Albury and now, the City of Melbourne’s Art and Heritage Collection.
On The Street Where I Live: Viva Gibb’s portrait of North and West Melbourne invites audiences to rediscover an extraordinary photographic legacy and the community it so lovingly portrays.
On The Street Where I Live: Viva Gibb’s portrait of North and West Melbourne
City Gallery – Melbourne Town Hall, Swanston Street, Melbourne
Exhibition: 12 March – 7 August 2026
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.melbourne.vic.gov.au for details.
Images: Viva Gibb, Giuseppe Lanteri ‘The Boss’ at Don Camillo Cafe, 215 Victoria Street, West Melbourne, 1979, silver gelatin print, 20 x 25.5 cm. Donated by Sybil Gibb and Rupert Duffy to the Melbourne Art Trust in memory of Viva Gibb 2025, © Courtesy of the Estate of Viva Gibb | Viva Gibb, Mr Lindsay Williams at his barber and tobacconist shop, Errol Street, North Melbourne, c. 1982, 20 x 25 cm. Donated by Sybil Gibb and Rupert Duffy to the Melbourne Art Trust in memory of Viva Gibb 2025, © Courtesy of the Estate of Viva Gibb | Viva Gibb, ‘Mason’, 64 Capel Street, West Melbourne, c. 1975-80, silver gelatin print, 21.5 x 16.5 cm. Donated by Sybil Gibb and Rupert Duffy to the Melbourne Art Trust in memory of Viva Gibb 2025, © Courtesy of the Estate of Viva Gibb | Viva Gibb, Self-portrait, 64 Capel Street, West Melbourne, c. 1975-78, silver gelatin print, 14 x 9 cm. Donated by Sybil Gibb and Rupert Duffy to the Melbourne Art Trust in memory of Viva Gibb 2025, © Courtesy of the Estate of Viva Gibb