Maybe This Week, Maybe Next Week
23 June 2025
My friend of many years, Kim Komenich, was doing a long haul drive to Missouri with an ex-student. On such drives you need more than coffee and generic meals, and so they came to asking ChatGPT to write about, amongst others, me. Or at least the photographer that I am. Here is the result:
Robert Gumpert’s photography is raw, unvarnished, and confrontational in the best way — it doesn’t just show reality, it forces you to sit with it. His style is rooted in access, honesty, and power dynamics, especially within systems most people would rather ignore: prisons, labor, poverty, and the state.
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📷 Robert Gumpert’s Style:
1. Blunt Intimacy
• Gumpert often photographs people in spaces where privacy and control are stripped away — jails, hospitals, industrial worksites.
• His portraits are brutally direct: no soft light, no dramatic staging, just truth.
• You get eye contact, hard shadows, scars, tattoos, dignity, and damage — all at once.
“This is who I am. This is what this place does.”
That’s the unspoken caption in so much of his work.
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2. Environment as a Character
• He doesn’t isolate his subjects from their surroundings — he frames them within the oppressive systems they live in.
• Cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights, industrial gear — all of it matters. All of it speaks.
The setting isn’t background. It’s indictment.
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3. Audio + Image = Narrative Truth
• He often records the voices of his subjects alongside their photos — especially incarcerated individuals.
• This turns a still image into a living testimony. You see a face, then hear their story in their own words.
• That combination collapses the gap between viewer and subject. It destroys distance.
The photo captures their condition. The audio restores their voice.
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4. No Flattery, No Apology
• His work is intentionally unpretty. It’s anti-aesthetic in the way that feels morally urgent.
• He’s not interested in making trauma palatable. He’s interested in making it undeniable.
• This style pushes the viewer out of passive consumption — you’re asked to confront, not admire.
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5. Access = Accountability
• His camera isn’t just there to observe — it’s there to document systems that thrive on invisibility.
• He gets inside jails, factories, and courts with an eye for both personal story and systemic failure.
He documents not just the person, but what the system has done to them — and what it says about us.
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🔥 Why It’s So Good (and Important):
Because in a culture of stylized suffering and Instagram empathy, Gumpert’s work says:
No filters. No distance. No easy takeaway.
His style:
• Gives voice to the unseen
• Treats photography as witness, not artifice
• Refuses to make pain aesthetic
• Makes the viewer accountable, not just the subject
Trump sucks up all the oxygen, even the storefront window of a sign maker on 9th Street in San Francisco. Photo: Robert Gumpert 20 June 2025
Even in the digital age, the telephone pole is still used as an analog messaging service. Bayshore and Jerrold Ave, San Francisco. Photo: Robert Gumpert 13 February 2025
Three women in an Alexandra Township hostel for migrant men. Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo: Robert Gumpert 1991
Sugarcane cutter headed to Negros cane fields with his cane knife/machetes and bowl for food/water. Negros, Philippines. Photo: Robert Gumpert 1987
The view from Liberty Bridge, near Leyton Road. London, England. Photo: Robert Gumpert 3 May 2024
Photography, Culture, Art
Reëxamining Victimhood in Guatemala - The photographer Luis Corzo returns to the scene of his own kidnapping. | Jonathan Blitzer/The New Yorker
Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s Geordie beaches | Michael Grieve/1000 Words
When the Fog Whispers explores the countryside of Saudi Arabia | BJP
Scientists Recreate Ancient Egypt’s Prized Blue Pigment | Maya Pontone/Hyperallergic
Podcasts
American Democracy Is Collapsing, And This Man Predicted It | Aaron Bastani Meets Joseph Stiglitz/Downstream
258 - Paul Seawright | Ben Smith/A Small Voice
CHANTAL RENS - cut glue stick combine Vernacular collage art | The Photo Vault
Books
Sergio Larrain – Valparaíso | Review by Brian Arnold/Photobook Journal
Copies of “Division Street are still available! Order your copy from Dewi Lewis:
“Division Street” – Order from Dewi Lewis: Orders: U.S.A – Britain - Canada
17 June 2025
“No Kings Day” participants arriving at Delores Park in San Francisco, kicking off site for the 50-60,000 who marched to the civic center to demand an end to the Trump presidency. 14 June 2025. Photo: Robert Gumpert
The “Statue of Liberty” gently weeps for the country under Donald Trump. “No Kings Day” march, San Francisco, California. 14 June 2025. Photo: Robert Gumpert
Where once there was a rail-yard and warehouses there are now apartments, businesses, medical services and research facilities with a diverse population of locals, nationals and immigrants. A local pizza joint in the new neighborhood of Mission Bay where research assistants, professors, young families, and entrepreneurs come to eat. San Francisco, California. 15 May 2025. Photo: Robert Gumpert
Picking pomegranates in California’s central valley near Fresno. With soaring temperatures and low wages workers in the field are almost exclusively migrants from south of the border. Many who have been in the States for years, have laid down roots, have families in local schools, support the local economies, pay taxes and social security. They now face deportation and the crops will rot all the ground before growers will find other workers or pay higher wages. Near Fresno, California, 1999. Photo: Robert Gumpert
The Reads
TEXAS ALREADY GIVES PUBLIC ED DOLLARS TO PRIVATE OPERATORS. HERE’S HOW THAT WORKED OUT. | Josephine Lee/Texas Observer
BETWEEN FIRES IN LOS ANGELES AND FASCISM IN AMERICA - Altadena’s vision of regeneration is the antidote to the political conflagration that threatens us all. | Robin D. G. Kelley/Hammer&Hope
Dispatches From the Death Chamber - A conversation with Elizabeth Bruenig about murder and forgiveness | Stephanie Bai/The Atlantic
Photography, Culture, Art
Photographer Robert Landau’s New Book Celebrates the Centennial of LA Art Deco | Charlotte Beach/Print
The Daily Heller: Presenting Poster Pop Paintings | Steven Heller/Print
Fata Morgana — Egypt’s Vast Uninhabited City Rising in the Desert | Photos-Texts Louis Roth/Lensculture
Lindokuhle Sobekwa | MagnumPhotography in a World Where the Center No Longer Holds
Photography in a World Where the Center No Longer Holds | Zack Hatfield/Aperture
Iran’s Daughters of the SeaForough Alaei’s stunning photographs of a community of fisherwomen on a remote island in the Persian Gulf | Robin Wright/New Yorker Photo Booth
RICHARD MISRACH: CARGO | Linda Alterwitz/Lenscratch
Following his death last week, BJP revisits a conversation with Nick Hedges on his work across working class Britain and his legacy contributions to British photography | BJP
Book
Black Chronicles - Photography, Race and Difference in Victorian Britain Edited by Renée Mussai
Science
Have LLMs Finally Mastered Geolocation? | Foeke Postma, Nathan Patin/Bellingcat
Copies of “Division Street are still available! Order your copy from Dewi Lewis:
“Division Street” – Order from Dewi Lewis: Orders: U.S.A – Britain - Canada