Vito Barone at his cake and coffee shop, Victoria Street, West Melbourne
This photograph by Viva Gibb is one of a number the artist took in her local neighbourhood, in West and North Melbourne during the 1970s and 1980s. Living, working and raising two children in West Melbourne, Gibb immersed herself in her local community, observing and documenting the people around her. Gibb created warm and sympathetic portraits of children, migrants, workers and elderly citizens. Her informal and intimate compositions celebrate the everyday and reveal her progressive and compassionate approach to humanity. In these portraits, Gibb has incorporated rich textural details as well as personalised contextual information for each of her subjects, providing viewers with small windows into the lives and characters of the people in her neighbourhood while making images that have now become historically and culturally significant social documents of this particular place in time.
(2020)
Gelatin silver prints are black-and-white photographic prints that have been created using papers coated with an emulsion of gelatin and light-sensitive silver salts. After the papers are briefly exposed to light (usually through a negative), a chemical developer renders the latent image as reduced silver, which is then fixed and washed. This technique was first introduced in the 1870s and is still used today. Most twentieth-century black-and-white photographs are gelatin silver prints. They are known for being highly detailed and sharply defined prints with a distinguishable smooth, even image surface.
