So I always start with telling them how sorry I am.
Always.
I am talking to this person in the worst moment of their life and about the worst moment of
their life.
And you have to respect that.
Over the past year, I've written about six different incidents of gun violence that have
impacted children in all sorts of places all over the country.
I went to Las Vegas, I went to Chicago, a school shooting in South Carolina.
Sutherland Springs was the first mass shooting I covered.
Six.
I think six.
I've done Newtown, I did Las Vegas, I did Dallas, I did Orlando, Parkland, and I also
covered the shooting in Tasmania in Australia back in 1997.
I was there about a year after the shooting happened but covered the aftermath.
So how old are you?
So I’m 25.
How many shootings have you covered?
Within the past year, three.
What's become regular in a two-decade career as a photojournalist at The Washington Post
is to have the cover the ever presence of gun violence, shootings.
Whether 26 people are killed or one person is killed, journalists have to cover the story
of shootings.
They need to get the facts, and do it fast.
They need to tell the story of the shooter, and the victims.
They need to be aware of the emotions involved, both of the people they’re covering, and
their own.
And just like any other story, there’s a reporting process.
We've done this so often now that I think we all know now that we go in and we need
a profile of the shooter.
We immediately start working on profiles of all the people who were killed.
Because I think that's in all of this coverage that's maybe the most important stuff that
we do.
I mean giving these people you know, introducing you to these people like meeting some of these
kids, kind of face to face seeing their picture understanding who they are.
That tells you pretty much all you need to know about what happened there.
We also need to cover the investigation so we have someone who stays very close to the
police or the FBI or whoever's investigating.
We always do what we call a Tick-Tock.
You know what happened.
Like sort of minute by minute best we can figure it out what happened.
How do you cover each of these shootings with not just the experience you bring to it but
with a fresh eye.
Because it's going to be new people, their raw tragedy, a new set of circumstances.
You can't really make assumptions just because it's the same profile of an incident that
you're covering.
No you can't.
Each one of these things is very unique.
No two of them are exactly alike.
The communities are all different.
Newtown is very different from Vegas is very different from Dallas and there's nothing
like Parkland.
They're all, they all have their own story.
And while there is there's a lot of overlap in the shooter's motivations that you see
over time or the inability to find any real motivation with a lot of these people.
It's - you sort of owe it to everyone.
To start fresh, and to really dig into these people and try to figure out who they were,
why they did what they did in the hopes that this information can help people in the future.
In the first couple of days there is no stopping it's just you're just on deadline and you're
going really quickly.
There's a lot of just riding on adrenaline and caffeine frankly.
I carry this adage of one of my old photo editors who's now deceased Michael duCille.
"Hit the ground running.
Hit the ground running," meaning whatever's there that most represents it, as quickly
as possible get it.
And I was driving around Newtown and I didn't see much but I saw outside this church.
I saw from the street where these cars are, uh some candles and people milling about.
And I knew I was looking for this.
This is late at night.
I see this lone dude standing there, and I just eased my way into a space where I know
with most graphically tell of this one person's sorrow.
This for me it represents that one, that then represents the whole of not just this happening,
but all the times that it's happened before then and all the times for me now all the
times that that has happened since then.
And for me knowing all the times that it will continue to happen.
This photo represents that for me.
What was it like to witness people's grieving process, and, and film it.
As a videographer even as a photographer, your job is to show people as they are grieving.
So you have to stick your camera in front of their faces.
And you can do it respectfully.
There are ways that you can do it where it’s not as intrusive.
You know, I would never get right up in your face and stick my lens in your face as you
were crying.
I would take a long lens and I would go a little bit further back, and I would try to
get it that way.
But at the same time, you know, it’s hard.
You want to give these people privacy.
And so sometimes what I'll do is I'll tape for ten seconds and then I'll walk away.
And I won't film anymore, you know.
Or other times if people make eye contact with me I’ll mouth, “is this OK.”
And sometimes they say yes, and sometimes they shake their heads and then, that’s
fine.
And I walk away.
You wrote an essay about covering the Sutherland shooting and you wrote that sometimes it's
not about just seeking the light but also providing some light.
What does that mean?
You know as photojournalists that's our job to seek beautiful light not only in the literal
sense of, light, but also in the sense of emotion and intimacy and moments and things
like that.
I think that those are forms of light too.
But you know in a situation like this shooting, and obviously in an ethical context, it's
important that we're really sensitive in how we talk to people.
If you’re, if you really are willing to sit with people and listen to them, I think
they sense that, they sense the people who are just doing a quick sort of, can you please
say something so I can write it down and move on.
You know I tell this to students coming up or anybody who asked me for advice about how
to get access.
And I tell them that the best way to be trusted with access is to approach people genuinely
trustworthy.
Period.
Not acting as if you're trustworthy.
Going to them as a being of trustworthiness.
Why did you take this picture.
What are we seeing in this?
We see on one of the first nights after the shooting we see how a small town that would
normally never look like this in terms of the population it looks like it has all of
a sudden inundated with not just media but mourners coming to lay those teddy bears and
flowers.
This town that all of a sudden has media outlets from not just this country but from all over
the world, kind of walking in the house you know and wiping their muddy shoes on the carpet
so to speak.
You know a lot of times I saw so many times the media what I call media overreach.
Where you know just stick in mics and cameras in people's faces without being sensitive
to this very dire situation.
So this is the reaction to that.
Get the f out of here - I won't say the word -enough is enough.
Let us let us live.
How do you deal with someone like this has had enough of not just the media but also
the crisis, right, the tragedy that has hit his community.
How do you respond to that and respect that but still do your job.
My immediate response was to turn around and do my job and take this picture because it's
one of the things I wanted to show as a storyteller.
The town’s response to the media.
But I just approach him as a human with humanity.
Like I feel you, I feel you I'm tired of us too.
You know.
Should there be that many cameras there?
Yeah I mean that is a question that I struggle with all the time.
Are we doing more harm than good.
But I do think that it is important to have people there telling the story and it is important
to have people there giving people in that community the chance to tell their story.
How do you get access to the stories of these children.
How do you get the families to open their door to you?
But also how do you get children to talk to you?
So you know I start, obviously, with the adults in their lives and you know try to build a
trust, I try to build a rapport with those people and I send them stories that I've written
before so they can give a sense of my approach and my tone.
And you know I answer any questions they have.
I try to be really honest with them about my approach.
And then you know with the kids especially the little ones you know I always ask the
parents to be there.
You know I ask them where they want to talk it's normally their room.
That's where their toys are that's where they're most comfortable.
And I try to get my eye level below theirs because I'm less scary.
I feel like less of an adult or authority in their life.
And I just asked very general questions.
I just say you know sort of tell me what happened that day and just let them go.
Journalists do not give kids enough credit.
We don't.
You know we have to fact check everything they tell us, cause kids' memories sometimes
are not perfect, but they will say things that are profound.
I mean I was sitting on the floor of a Cleveland hotel asking a 4-year-old what it was like
to get shot in the head.
And he was telling me.
But you know I'll never forget the moment - I will never forget the moment when I ask
him why he thought this happened.
And this 4-year-old with a bullet wound in his forehead just sort of leaned over on the
floor just kind of slumped over and said I don't know.
You know for me it was so quiet and so simple but it was just devastating.
Yeah.
You know, John, I think for a lot of people, me included, sometimes I just want to tune
out these stories.
Because it's so emotionally wrenching.
Yeah.
And you feel like it's happening again.
Do you ever want it to tune out, first of all.
And second of all why keep writing about it, if some of the public is just shutting down
reading the news about this.
So I think absolutely I want to shut it down sometimes and have reached moments of real
burnout in the reporting of these stories.
But I think the way to kind of crack through that is to zoom way in, on one child's experience.
I think people have a harder time ignoring singular stories, individual events that they
can relate to.
That this is like my child, or my niece or nephew.
You wrote about 7-year-old Eva Olsen who's in South Carolina who, saw her friend, a little
boy, shot on the playground.
And she survived that.
So you know she was every other kid until that day she was, wanted to be a cheerleader.
She was a Daisy Scout.
You know, had just learned to do a cartwheel.
It was recess and it was a kid's birthday so she had a cupcake.
And she was going out to the playground, when a teenager, 14-year-old, pulled up and opened
fired on the playground full of first graders.
And it was 12 seconds from beginning to end from when he first fired the shot to the last
shot.
And the boy she wanted to marry, this little boy named Jacob Hall, he was hit and died
a few days later.
Can we look at some of your Parkland footage?
Yeah absolutely.
This is from a piece that you did from Florida.
And I just want to look at this footage because you captured these students, speaking out,
protesting, but the looks of emotion on their face are so intense.
I mean this, they're out in public but they're so raw.
Yeah.
That was kind of the point - is just showing how angry these students were.
And how they felt like they weren't being listened to, and how they couldn't believe
that this was something that had happened in their community.
And so I think it was really, really vital for this and for kind of the story of Parkland
in general to get that emotion, and to see that rawness because at the end of the day
these are still kids, right?
I mean these are kids who should feel like they can go to school and not have to worry
about someone coming in with a gun.
Let's talk about this family that you met and photographed the funeral of her son.
So you were on assignment in California reporting on gun deaths and this is not the mass shooting
tragedy this is the like the singular deaths that add up over time.
Um hm.
These are friends?
Yeah close friends of this guy who was gunned down.
What are you capturing here?
I'm trying to deepen the layers of what's shown.
I’m trying to expose more layers of who's been affected by these, the gun violence.
The kids who are out on the streets that have in too many cases become war zones.
I mean they're so young too, they've got like, little peach fuzz facial hair.
Exactly, they're boys trying to become men and then all of a sudden being reduced to
child - children in their emotions.
Children in the sense that - are open to expressing their emotions.
You also have a photo where we see the mom.
With her son.
It makes me emotional.
You're telling me you were getting emotional is making me emotional.
And I am, it's kind of wild.
Because this is weird, you know it is just, this is strange.
But what it is is the release of what was absorbed.
I was the person who put myself in that trustworthy position to carry some of her pain.
Yeah.
And she gave it and I allow myself to take this is an expression of it.
I can almost guarantee you that I was autofocusing this because I was crying at the time.
I can almost guarantee you that.
How do you process what's going on emotionally.
Stay respectful of the people you're photographing.
But still do your job and send back pictures that will make deadline and tell the world
about what's happening in a small community in Texas.
To be really frank with you, I think throughout the ten days I just suppressed completely
how I was feeling.
There was no time to process it.
In fact if I did process it at that time it wouldn't have been a great thing.
And it's like this weird adrenaline professional mode and you go through it.
You just get through it.
And I think that that is important to acknowledge that people, you know there's a thing called
vicarious trauma.
And like people who cover these things - like it does affect us.
It's not that we're superhuman and don't, we aren't affected by these things because
we are but.
You know you have to keep that in check and recognize that you are being affected even
if it feels like you aren't.
You get a little numb, which is terrible to say but you do and I maybe it's a little bit
about all of autopilot kicking back in where, you're reporting on it and you have a mission
and just want to do the best job that you can in telling that story.
And so there's not really room to let emotions get in the way of that.
You know my reaction to Parkland was kind of, scary, a little bit, for me because it
just - I'd really never experienced something like that.
I look at the screen at CNN, and children are being wheeled out of Parkland on stretchers.
And you know I had a physical reaction to that that day.
I just, it was overwhelming.
It was just overwhelming to see it happening again.
I mean part of that part of our job is to be there and to and to you know to be able
to swallow our own emotions and elicit the information get the get the information the
stories that are then useful to the people who are reading them.
Although, I must say the only time I have ever cried as a reporter was in Tasmania.
I met a guy who's he was about 70 years old and his daughter and two granddaughters had
been killed.
And hearing him tell the story.
It was hot that day.
And the bodies, there were 35 bodies and they came to rest all over the place and the police
needed to move the bodies because it was hot.
But they also needed to know where they were.
So what they did was they pounded the spike in the ground where the head had come to rest.
So I was talking to this guy and he was crouched down in the street and he was touching something
on the asphalt and I said What are you, what are you doing.
And he said.
He said this is my daughter's head.
I'm like oh, killed you.
So these things are you know it does it does get to you.
But you have to try to be professional.
And suck it up.
Sutherland Springs was half-a-year ago now.
How often do you think about it?
Uh, often.
Yeah, it never really leaves.
And anybody who thinks that this is easy, or that we want to go cover these things is
lying.
It's just not true.
You know, we feel a responsibility to tell those stories and that's why we keep going
and going and going.
The NRA spokeswoman and a video from NRA TV have said that the mainstream media love mass
shootings.
You love the ratings.
Crying white mothers are ratings gold.
I’ll say it again.
The mainstream media loves mass shootings.
You know it's just patently false.
What was your reaction when you first heard that.
I was I was angry.
You know, I honestly, I mean it's hard for me to be angered by anything that partisans
have to say, but that made me angry.
Because I've been that person then I know that people who go.
Over and over.
People who've gone a lot more than I have to these things and we never want to go.
We never want to get on that plane, ever.
What's the first thought that goes through your head when you catch one of these stories
and you realize you're going to cover a shooting.
I don't want to go.
When I hear about a shooting that has happened especially a mass shooting, and when I catch
the call, I don't want to go.
Usually what happens is you see the news.
And there's kind of a moment where you just feel this sinking feeling in your gut.
It's usually some, some God-awful hour and I'll get a my phone ding with a text message
saying, you know 10 people dead in a shooting in, in Las Vegas.
And when the first message says 10 you know that means 50.
So because it's always, you know, the first count is always very low.
I just get up and start packing a bag because I know my phone's going to be ringing in the
next hour.
And it always does.
And you go.