Unmade beds and overdue books

The families of eight school shooting victims opened their doors to Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp, allowing them to document their children's bedrooms, just as they left them.

Each room waits for a child who will not return.

Their parents hope that these images will stick with you, that you'll carry a piece of their collective pain and use your heartache to help bring about change.

From Steve Hartman: "I never wanted to be this kind of reporter"

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 here I stand, 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."

Read more from Steve about this project here.

Photographer Lou Bopp: "How do you make a portrait of a child who is not there?"

I am an on-location commercial photographer, photographing people and pets on-location for large brands, per my LinkedIn professional profile. Yet here I was, on a project where there was no one to take photos of -- for the most brutal of reasons. How do you make a portrait of a child who is not there?

Their personalities shone through in the smallest details of their untouched rooms -- hair ties on a doorknob, a toothpaste tube left uncapped, a ripped ticket for a school event -- allowing me to uncover glimpses as to who they were.

Over the course of more than six years, we visited with many families. But each time I received a call or text from Steve about a new family, my heart sank. It meant another family had lost a child.

Read more from Lou about this project here.

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