Still Photographer: Lou Bopp

In this episode, Christina sits down with still photographer Lou Bopp.

Lou never went to photography school. He grew up in St. Louis obsessed with the Magnum photographers (Elliott Erwitt, Sebastião Salgado, James Nachtwey) but didn't think he could do it professionally. That changed when he happened to be visiting a friend in Germany the week the Berlin Wall came down. He stepped through a hole in the wall, put one foot in East Berlin and the other in West Berlin, and shot straight down the middle. He sold the photo to the AP for $100. It funded another week of travel through Europe and started his career.

Three decades later, Lou was the still photographer at the center of the Academy Award-winning documentary All the Empty Rooms — a film that traveled the country photographing the bedrooms of children lost to school shootings, in homes their parents hadn't touched since.

Across the conversation, he shares the year of unanswered phone calls that landed him a Sports Illustrated internship, what it takes to be "slippery" as a still photographer on a film set, why he's been photographing his daughter every day for 17 years, and how one detail in a child's bedroom in Parkland reminded him of the Berlin Wall photo that started it all.

Lou's credits include:


ALL THE EMPTY ROOMS (2025)

A DIFFERENT BREED (2025)

HAPPENING (2017)

MOONSHINE AND MOJO HANDS (2014-2015)

WE JUKE UP IN HERE (2012)

And many more...

Follow Lou and his work below:


Website: https://loubopp.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/loubopp/?hl=en

You can also learn more about Oscar-winning film All the Empty Rooms and how you can help take action here: https://www.alltheemptyrooms.com