Meet this Photographer: Dr. Greg Gulbransen

Some of you may have read the recent story in the New Yorker about Dr. Greg Gulbransen (@greggulbransenpeds). If you haven’t, it’s absolutely worth your time. I met Greg a couple of years back when he approached me with hundreds of photographs that were brilliant, chilling, and emotional. We decided to make a book, which Gost published last year and which won the Lucie Award for Best Photo Book in 2024.

Greg is a pediatrician with a big heart and a passion for public health. He took up

photography later in life. And it took to him. His concern about the epidemic of gun

violence in this country led him to make photographs in the Bronx, which is where he met and became friends with Malik, a young gang leader. A year or so before they met, Malik had been shot by a rival gang. The bullet pierced his spine and left him paralyzed from the chest down. Malik ran his crew from his wheelchair, mostly from his apartment. Greg spent three-plus years with Malik, and his family, much of it in the housing-project apartment where they live and where the gang came, daily, to talk business, smoke weed, and take care of Malik.

Greg’s access was unfettered, which is evident from his pictures. (Ever seen the members of violent street gang carry their leader, naked, into the shower?)

I feel extremely fortunate to have worked with Greg on the project and to have written the text that accompanies his stunning, intimate photographs. “The physician in me wants to show people who don’t live in areas with high rates of gun violence how terrible it can be, how complicated the problem is, how far-reaching the effects of the gun-violence epidemic are,” Greg once explained to me. “The photographer in me is trying show what it’s like to be a victim of gun violence while also being a part of the problem.”

It’s a powerful, thoughtful body of work. As Greg told me: “I’m trying to complicate things for readers by hopefully showing that passing judgment on people like Malik might be more difficult, morally speaking, than they think,” he said. “There are a lot of victims here and, yes, some of them are perpetrators, too.”

You can find more of Greg’s work here, on BluePhoto.