Photographer Documents Untouched Children’s Bedrooms Left by School Shootings in Netflix’s ‘All The Empty Rooms'

A photographer and journalist document the children’s bedrooms left behind by school shootings and the lasting grief in the Netflix documentary All the Empty Rooms.

Over the course of seven years, CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp traveled across the country to photograph bedrooms left largely untouched, capturing intimate portraits of how parents preserve their children’s spaces long after they are gone.

The project is featured in the 35-minute documentary All the Empty Rooms, directed by Joshua Seftel. The film follows Hartman as he visits the homes of several children who fell victim to school shootings. Alongside him, photographer Bopp captures images of their rooms — with invitation and trust of the parents. Bopp’s photographs highlight ordinary objects and subtle details that reveal the children’s daily lives before the tragedy: an uncapped toothpaste tube, a teenager’s letter to their future self, a rumpled bed, a pile of laundry, or hair ties still hanging on a doorknob.

In the short film, Bopp photographed eight bedrooms, four of which are featured in All the Empty Rooms. The children profiled in the documentary were between the ages of 9 and 15. Speaking to Deadline, Bopp explains the care he took while photographing the children’s rooms and how he removed his shoes before entering.

“They trusted us. They let us in the rooms, and I did everything I could to treat it with the utmost respect,” the photographer says. “Taking off my shoes was part of it, and not touching anything in the rooms was part of it.”

Director Joshua Seftel says the documentary focuses on honoring and remembering the children by highlighting their individuality and the lives they led, rather than only reporting on the tragedy.

“In many ways, this film is about silence. We wanted to try to give people the experience of what it’s like to step into these rooms, and to feel the absence of these children,” Seftel says in a news release for Netflix. “We also spent time lingering on Lou’s photographs, the small details he captured with his camera in each bedroom — hair bands on a doorknob, a well-worn blankie, an overdue library book, a cap left off a toothpaste tube — because the photos are how we begin to understand who each child was.

“And words aren’t necessary for that. Each child in this film was an individual who had a rich and unique life, and I hope people will get a sense of what they liked to do, and what gave them joy. To me, this film is about loss, and to understand that loss, I think you need to understand the life that was there before.”

Hartman did his first assignment covering a school shooting for CBS News in 1997. Text in the documentary notes that since then, school shootings have risen from 17 per year to 132 per year.

Image credits: All photos via Netflix.