For the past 25 years, Tom Fildey has struggled whenever he has had to take a photo of a stranger.
Fildey was an intern for Evergreen Newspapers — which published the Columbine Community Courier, the area’s local newspaper — when the Columbine High School attack occurred in 1999. He was only 19, but was called on by editors to help cover the story. His job: take photos.
A senior at Evergreen High School, he was at Columbine as students like him, his own age, were stuck inside the school. Fildey was outside, with a camera, surrounded by throngs of reporters and doing something he was unprepared to do.
The young photojournalist didn’t even know where to start in covering a tragedy like this one. He didn’t know about media staging areas, where reporters are cordoned off by first responders during emergencies. He wasn’t sure what the etiquette was. All he knew was that he was supposed to capture as much as he could with his camera.
“I was just kind of wandering around, trying to get whatever photos I could as they let the kids out towards the buses,” he said. “I can’t even tell you, to this day, what was going through those kids’ heads. Lots of screaming, lots of crying.”
Fildey said the morning was a blur of “just kind of wash, rinse, repeat” trying to get photos. Later in the day, he went back to the newsroom in Evergreen and spent the rest of the night processing film for the newspaper.
That was just the first day of many. Fildey said his experience in the following weeks is where the trauma started to set in.
The process of going to the school almost every day – for 12-hour days – and capturing photos of people in their grief left a lasting impact on him.
“I am no longer a photographer,” he said. “I found it even more difficult, in the months and years that followed, just to show up at a random assignment and lift the camera to a complete stranger, after doing that for so long with so much grief.”
He now works as a graphic designer, creating ads and laying out news stories, photos and headlines for newspapers at Colorado Community Media. The organization owns two dozen metro area newspapers, including some from the chain where Fildey interned.
Reflecting on his career, he doesn’t attribute his move away from photojournalism entirely to covering the Columbine shooting. He met his wife, started a family, got a house and started going further down the graphic design path. Now, he appreciates the balance that his career gives him to focus on things that matter in his life.
But the experience did impact his relationship to the camera. He still loves taking photos, but to this day, taking photos of strangers is challenging for him. Even when he knows he has the legal right to photograph people in public, he said it feels like an invasion of privacy.
A couple of months ago, he went to Evergreen Lake to photograph people ice skating for the Canyon Courier. He said it was his third photojournalism assignment in about 20 years.
“But there was still something, in the pit of my stomach, just showing up, at random, in public — where I’ve got every right to photograph anything,” he said. “There was still something like, ‘Are these people going to yell at me or be mad at me?’ … It was small, but it was there.”
While he was covering the aftermath of the Columbine tragedy, Fildey said there were times people got angry at him for being there with his camera. One time, a woman came up to him, pointing her finger in his face and yelling at him to leave, saying he didn’t understand what they had been through.
“I don’t blame her for it,” Fildey said. “She just needed me to be that grounding wire for her in that particular moment.”
He said the media became an outlet for the grief that the students were feeling, which, understandably, caused anger and resistance.
“They didn’t know how to process what they were going through, but there we were to document it,” he said.
Today, 25 years later, Fildey said he thinks photojournalists — and reporters in general — approach their work with more empathy than they did when the Columbine shooting happened.
Although he is not directly involved in the reporting process, he said he listens to the reporters in his newsroom and notices there is less dark humor in their conversations than there was back in those days.
Being part of these conversations is the main reason Fildey loves journalism, and why he decided to stay in it for the long run. Even though he doesn’t usually take the photos or write the stories, it’s a world he loves to be a part of.
“It’s kind of like feeling the warmth of the sun,” he said. “It’s just like, intelligent people having intelligent conversations about things that matter. It’s kind of like a drug.”