As Andy Grundberg points out in this review of Robert Bergman: Portraits, 1986–1995 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in Aperture's blog Exposures though there is nothing radical about Grunberg's compositions, but his harmonic handling of color and his choices about how to fill the frame show that he is attuned to the legacies of his contemporaries William Eggleston and Nan Goldin.

Gundberg, the former New York Times critic, goes on to say:

there’s a temptation to dismiss Bergman’s pictures as latter-day Bowery Bum photography. Most of his ink-jet-produced, moderately sized prints show us the faces of people he encountered on the streets of major cities in the Midwest and eastern United States. They are posed portraits: the subjects gaze down or away into the distance, or else stare confrontationally at the camera. For the most part, the people appear to be downtrodden or at least on the outs with conventional society; more than a few seem afflicted with a wasting disease.

Grundberg continues:

Unfortunately it is impossible to verify any of the questions a viewer might have about these people, since Bergman calls each image “Untitled” and provides it with only a date. No name, no location, no facts except those given by the lens—presumably Bergman wants his subjects to be open
to whatever preconceptions and prejudices his viewers may project onto them. In the context of the gallery, though, this denial of extrapictorial detail seems less a social statement than an aesthetic position: we are forced back on Bergman’s compositions, his use of color, the consistency of his choices of framing, even his decision about which subjects to shoot.

Rather than explore this issue Grundberg turns to Bergman's motives:

Surely he can’t be concerned that these pictures in any way improve the lives of the people they portray, since we don’t know where or who they are. Perhaps the ambition is for our regard of the pain of others to make us more attuned to human suffering in general (come back, Susan Sontag, please), but this aim is attenuated by our prior experience of pictures in the same vein. We might expect anyone conversant with recent photographic practice to know this as an existing critical problem, which leaves us with a far less ennobled idea of what is afoot here: that Bergman is out to convince us that he is a great photographer. Unfortunately, he has appeared a half-century too late.