Sight: Your subjects' eyes are often haunting. Do you consciously think about capturing the eyes when photographing?Gumpert: Objective journalism as opposed to honest/truthful reporting, has always seemed a lie to me. To do the job means to step into the scene, to dig, to feel, to question. How you do that is determined by your point of view. To step back for the objective look means doing less of a job, at least to me. Lewis Hine said he photographed those things that needed to be changed and those things that needed to be appreciated. I believe that is the charge of any good journalist and to do it with as much honesty to your particular truth as possible. It is the reader's responsibility to take into account the reporter's and the publication's point of view.
Further it seems to me that the particular strength of photos is not as a chronicle of physical facts but more capturing emotional content. It is, I believe, the most misunderstood element of the medium by both editors and photographers and perhaps the biggest reason why photos are usually confined to illustration - and perhaps why it seems most photographers see themselves as illustrators producing beautiful but spineless photos for editorial use or PR without seeing much difference between the two.
So the eyes. My job is to bring what I am seeing to the viewer. McCullin said he photographed what to others was in too poor taste. He went to the "heart of darkness" of any situation. When he saw it, unlike most of us, he didn't blink...He took pictures. Those pictures are so strong they don't allow the viewer the luxury of blinking. The viewer is forced to confront "those things that needed to be changed" and they have to decide, on some level, where they stand. Eyes force people to connect.
Sight: How do you personally deal with photographing hard-core situations, such as when bodies are involved?
Gumpert: Someone who saw my selection at Sight sent a message in which he which he suggested, as a photographer himself, that taking pictures allows us (photographers) the luxury of time to deal with reality. The camera as boundary between us and the real world, and then the editing and the printing. I say No! I believe to take pictures you have to be involved on some level, not insulated. Feeling the camera offers a degree of safety is not the same as being divorced from the subject. If that was the case the photos wouldn't look as they do. For me I cannot make a "real" photo of something I don't feel. (As a pro I can fulfill the assignment but that isn't what I'm talking about here...those all too few photos of any meaning or lasting quality.) We as journalist photographers have a number of responsibilities: to the subject, to the reader and to ourselves. No one has forced us into these situations, unordinary for the rank and file citizen. It seems once there, it would be a crime not to take the strongest photo possible, and those are basically my conscious thoughts as I look around and as I take the shots. Less conscious thoughts are about what happened, who the person was, why they're laying there with their life leaking out into the street and I'm not. I go home and have nightmares.
Sight: You've been so many places. Are you by nature a nomadic photographer?
Gumpert: Yes, I guess so. It isn't the money (no one ever paid me to go anyplace with the exception of Panama), and now money is on an even shorter leash. I just like to travel. You never know what will happen, and hopefully you always come home changed in some way. But why the particular places? My interests are really in themes, not places, and so the places I go are more determined by knowing about stories on the themes I'm interested in and the cost of the trip or country.