The dimly lit bowels of San Francisco's City Hall provide an appropriate mood for Robert Gumpert's broad and compelling show examining the city's criminal justice system. The exhibit is called Lost Promise, and in 96 grainy black and white images organized into four chapters he tells a moving story. Working closely with participants on "both sides" of the law, he seeks to cut through the glamour and misconceptions that most of us get about law enforcement from television and movies, and reveal a system where the danger is much more tangible, where the boundaries between the opposing sides are often fuzzy and not placed where we might expect, and where everyone is tired and anxious and more afraid than they usually will admit.

The photos all appear to be shot on high-speed (probably pushed) black and white film. They are moderately grainy, and it appears that no flash was ever used. The light comes from streetlamps, headlights, flashlights, and interior building lights. Coupled with the graininess, it gives them all a consistent gritty and moody feel. The photos are usually taken close in, revealing much about the subjects through faces and postures.

Each chapter of about 25 photos opens with a statement about the context and the people involved. Each individual image is also accompanied by more text, usually in the form of stories captured through quotes from some of the individuals pictured, or those otherwise involved in the scene. The words alone would tell a moving story. Together with the images it is a compelling, and even draining one. Over the course of two separate visits totaling over 90 minutes at City Hall, I only covered chapters one and two in detail, and moved quickly through chapters three and four. Taking in all that this show has to give requires both a bit of time and stamina on the part of the viewer.

Chapter 1 - The Police

The very first image shows a skewed aerial view of the Tenderloin, where the 24 images in this chapter were taken. It could be any city, any downtown grid of blocks. It certainly seems more benign and poetic than dangerous when taken from above, with no people visible. The second image thrusts us right into the bleak reality we are to encounter here, as a black man lies dead on a street corner. His stomach is down on the pavement, but his head is turned to the side, so we can see his features. A stream of his blood runs to the curb at Turk and Taylor. A police car sits in the intersection with its lights on. Now the mood is truly set, the players introduced.

From here we are taken through a series that begins to develop the story. The first is a cop at a desk covered with papers and pens, and heavy guns that could almost be paperweights but for our surety that they will be picked up and accompany the officer when he leaves. His face is hidden behind paperwork, but we are not meant to know him. The text relates a misfortune that befell the man after the photo was taken. In the next image, another officer peers intently into a computer monitor. With or without technology, we're informed that paperwork and reports and tedium are a big part of this job. In the next few images, we're also shown people being held at the station, and being arrested in the streets.

Gumpert also knows how to insert lighter mood breakers in the show, but he uses them to reveal some of the ambiguity of the boundaries and relationships in this alien world. In one, a "working girl" is shown at night, standing outside of a well-lit clothing store. She wears a skimpy and revealing white leather outfit and stands on white high heels. She looks provocatively directly into the camera, with a luring and challenging "come on" expression. It is the first direct gaze offered by any subject so far, and one of the very few in the show. On the brick wall behind her is an ad for frozen yogurt that reads When Taste Matters. The woman pictured in the ad is eating a spoonful of yogurt, and although her head is turned in a ¾ profile, her eyes too look straight at the viewer.

In the text, the subject explains how she is "not a ho" because this is her job, and argues that she likes sex anyway, implying that it makes it all fine. Additional quotes from a cop and another working girl further reveal the complex relationship between the cops and the hookers, where dominance, superiority, and infatuation may all play a part - but the officers really don't see these women as dangerous or any real threat.

This image and its explanation serve as just one example among many of how Gumpert seems to have spent his time well, and had the willingness and ability to connect with his subjects, getting both revealing quotes and truthful images from them. He also takes the opportunity to find the occasional moments of humor and lightness among the grimness he usually depicts.

Chapter 2 - Jail

This chapter of 26 photos also opens with one of the few "scene setting" shots that contain no people. It shows the interior of the County Jail 9 intake facility. It too is depicted at an angle that removes some of its grimness, perhaps obscuring the reality of its steel doors, cinderblock walls, and the small sign reminding officers to secure their firearms, ammunition, and knives before entering. And again, the drama quickly returns as we are then shown scenes of people being handcuffed, booked, and even dragged through the halls of this facility as they are "processed in".

Here some faces show annoyance and impatience, some anger, some anguish, while others appeared deadened and devoid of emotion - but none show fear, which can only be whispered in confidence to a friend, or admitted alone in a private moment. We are reminded by the cold direct stare, tattoos, and lesions of one woman that sadly this is still a preferable existence for some people - affording them relative warmth, safety, and sustenance compared to life on the street.

We're also shown several images of people having their possessions taken from them. This includes a man who watches a clerk count out his money, a skinhead having a heavy metal chain cut from his neck with massive bolt cutters, and a young woman having a stud removed from her lip through a group effort that requires several officers wielding two pairs of needle-nose pliers and a flashlight.

Chapter 3 - Homicide

Here, in 21 photos, Gumpert follows the path of two investigators and "develops their characters" more fully as he follows them through several cases over time. Gumpert alternates the brief intensity of the arrival at a crime scene containing a dead body with the drawn out tedium of the ongoing process of investigation. Well, at least scenes of a murder with the victim's corpse still present are presumably intense to the viewers of this show. In the accompanying text, the homicide inspector indicates that he is already "inured to all this that you don't even think this is any big deal". The majority of the images show the investigators following leads, waiting for lab results, pondering clues, and trying to unravel their "whodunits".

Chapter 4 - Court

The final 25 photos follow the actions of Jeff Adachi, a Public Defender. In them, he is shown reviewing evidence, meeting with his clients, working in his tiny office crammed full of paperwork and files, rehearsing for, and finally appearing in court. Carrying a load of up to 90 clients at once, he is shown to be yet one more tired and sometimes frustrated man who has been asked to do more than he can. Through him, the system's Public Defenders are depicted as yet one more caste of overworked actors in this play. Again, the boundaries in this world are examined, as it is suggested that the public defenders are often seen by the cops as closer to their clients, the alleged criminals, than to the hard working officers whom they often must try to discredit or undermine in the pursuit of freedom for their clients.

I feel that Robert Gumpert's ultimate point is that all of these people, existing in a world that few of us ever enter or comprehend, are really more like each other than they are different, because they at least understand each other in a way that we just can't. The world Gumpert reveals is their daily reality, and it works based on rules neither recorded in the official books of law nor in the Hollywood screenplays. That knowledge is their ultimate bond -- that, and the fact that the Lost Promise clearly exists on both sides of a fence so riddled with gaps it no longer divides anything. In the end, everyone here is a victim, who can be ground up and be forgotten by this system -- for it will inevitably keep going with fresh meat to grind. Everyone is at risk, be they cop or lawyer or criminal, so in the end, everyone is equal.