Standing on the threshold of grief, documenting the bedrooms of kids killed in school shootings

I never wanted to be this kind of reporter, knocking on the door of someone who lost a child in a school shooting. And yet there I stood, knocking, nonetheless.

I found myself here, standing on the threshold of grief across the country, after years of pent-up frustration. By 2018, America's school shooting epidemic had taken a toll on me. There were so many that the news coverage felt like a treadmill. It seemed to me the country had grown numb and lost its empathy for the victims and the families. I wanted to do something.

For help, I reached out to Lou Bopp, one of the best still photographers in the country. But he said he had never faced a challenge quite like this: "to take a portrait of a person who's not there."