Maybe This Week, Maybe Next Week
03 July 2025
16 June 2023: Patrick Riley and Amelia Mustain across from their RV on Selby, just south of Evans.
Patrick “Project” Riley and his dog were shot dead at 3:05 p.m. on Selby near Toland, the 23rd of December 2024.. While an arrest was made, the DA refused to bring the case to trial. Photographed on 2 July 2025, the RIP “Project” Rest in Peace”, marking where he and Amelia lived remains. Photos: Robert Gumpert
Blooming artichokes in a vase on a table. Photo: Robert Gumpert 29 June 2025
Landscaping. 20th Street and Pennsylvania. San Francisco, California. Photo: Robert Gumpert 22 June 2025
Sleeping rough on Division Street and San Bruno. San Francisco, California. 23 June 2025
9th floor, the roof, of a parking garage on the border of the Tenderloin, Union Square and the theatre district. San Francisco, California. Photo: Robert Gumpert 30 June 2025
The Reads
How Hotels, Once a Last Resort, Became New York’s Default Answer to Homelessness | Spencer Norris/New York Focus
Portland Said It Was Investing in Homeless People’s Safety. Deaths Have Quadrupled. | K. Rambo/Street Roots
Pro sports have long seemed like the closest thing we have to a true meritocracy. But maybe not anymore. | Jay Caspian Kang/The New Yorker
The Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe is bridging Nevada’s healthcare gap | Kaleb Roedel/KUNR
Books
In the Heart of the Sea - The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex | Nathanial Philbrick/Penguin Press
Photography, Culture, Art
La Cité Oasis: an enchanting photographic journey through France's most innovative city | Tom May/Creative Boom
The Tour de France by France-Soir photographers | Roger Viollet
Việt Kiều — Documenting Vietnamese Diaspora Around the World | Photos Jess Tran; Eassay Marigold Warner/LensCulture
Photo-Projects | Abeer Khan
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
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