An AP photographer expresses a man’s quest to recover memories of himself in a dream-like photo

SAN CARLOS, Calif. (AP) — Pulitzer Prize winner David Goldman, based in Providence, R.I., has traveled the world for assignments in his 15 years as an Associated Press photographer.

Here is what he had to say about this extraordinary photo.

Why this photo?

This was a story about Christy Morrill, who lost decades of memories to autoimmune encephalitis. I had spent a few days with him photographing his life, but the biggest challenge was to capture an essence of the search he has been on to find out who he was all those years and who he is now. What does memory loss look like, what does that quest to learn about yourself look like? These were the questions haunting me leading up to and including the time I was with him. I was trying to find a way to show that. They are so important to the story but not necessarily tangible moments easy to photograph.

How I made this photo

One afternoon we were sitting around his house, and he was pulling out old slide film, letters and photos combing through all of it. He recently found some new letters that he wrote when he was in college to some friends. He was reading through them, hoping it jogged some recollection of that time in his life. He does this with photos as well. Christy was using an eye loop to look at old color slide film up against the window, allowing the light to illuminate the image of him. I saw it was a picture of Christy as a young man and it was a fairly tight image so his face showed up well on the little thumbnail slide. As he held it up, I thought about the idea of making a portrait with him holding up the eye loop, the image of him as a young man the focal point while hiding his 72-year-old self in the background.

Why this photo works

To me this image captures an element of Christy searching for his past. We see him as a young man, the person in part he has forgotten and is desperately trying to remember. It was my intention to hide his current self behind that. I don’t think we need to see what he looks like now. But I wanted to make sure we did see a little of him - his mouth, for example, an expression that would give some insight into his mood, his state of mind during this search. We can feel a little of that just with the slight expression we see. But most importantly, what we want to see is what it’s like for him to look back into history. And I feel the short focal depth gives it a bit of a dreamy feel, which evokes that feeling of memories and his longing for the ones he lost.

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