Brooklyn Bridge Park exhibit and documentary film memorialize children lost to school shootings
The images of a laundry hamper full of clothes, an unmade bed and a crowded bookshelf stop people in their tracks. The photographs were taken inside the bedrooms of children killed in school shootings, transforming everyday details into memorials.
The public photography exhibit at Brooklyn Bridge Park is drawing visitors into intimate spaces frozen in time: children's bedrooms left exactly as they were before their lives were cut short.
"I felt like the country was growing numb to the whole school shooting epidemic. And I was like, what could I possibly do to shake people out of that numbness, including myself? Because I was growing numb to it," said Steve Hartman, a CBS News correspondent who has covered close to a dozen school shootings. "I felt like they were all blending together, and we were just accepting it as a nation."
Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp are now the subject of the short documentary "All the Empty Rooms," directed by Joshua Seftel, which takes viewers inside these preserved spaces.
"As they happen more and more often, the news coverage would shrink to maybe a couple of days, and then we're on to the next story. It just felt wrong, and it felt like we needed to sort of wake up as a nation and restore our empathy," he said.
The film, now nominated for an Oscar, presents seemingly ordinary rooms that families have turned into sacred spaces, preserving them for years as a way to process grief.
"They're places that most people don't get to see, and we wanted to share those with the world so that they can see the toll that gun violence is taking on these families and on our country," Seftel said. "The rooms are exactly the way they were when their child left for school that morning, and they never came back."
Mia Tretta, a survivor of a 2019 school shooting in Santa Clarita, California, said the violence remains deeply personal.
"I was hanging out with my friends before class when he pulled that gun out of his backpack and shot me and four others, killing two of them," she said.
One of those killed was her best friend, Dominic Blackwell.
"In his bedroom, you see the SpongeBob all over and the sports trophies and football, and you really get a sense for who he was as a person," Tretta said.
Bopp's photos of Blackwell's room are among those attracting attention at the Brooklyn Bridge Park display.
"It's a very eye-catching thing, and I think most of us can really relate to that intimate space in the home, thinking about what happens when that person is no longer there," said Cailley Frank-Lehrer, senior producer of Photoville, which is behind the exhibit.
"All the Empty Rooms" is streaming on Netflix. The photography installation will remain on display at Pier 1 in Brooklyn Bridge Park through March 4.
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