Loren Elliott, a Point Reyes Station native who lives in Houston, was part of a team of 11 Reuters photographers recognized with a Pulitzer Prize this week for their ongoing coverage of the migration of Central Americans toward the United States border. Mr. Elliott, a freelancer for Reuters, contributed one photo to the winning selection: a woman from Honduras reuniting with her 6-year-old son in Harlingen, Tex. after a month-long separation. “There was a lot of time that I put in to gain enough trust with Anita, the mother, so that in that moment, she forgot about me, she trusted me, she trusted my intention in being there and I was able to capture a moment of genuine intimacy,” Mr. Elliott said. As a youth, Mr. Elliott attended schools over the hill before earning an undergraduate degree in environmental studies from Seattle University. After taking a few photographs for his university’s newspaper, he decided to pursue a master’s degree in the art from the University of Missouri. Though he never finished his degree, he wound up as a full-time staffer at the Tampa Bay Times in 2015, where he spent several years before leaving for Texas in 2018 to cover the border; it was a move he called “a leap of faith.” Carlos Porrata, an Inverness resident and family friend, said he thought “the way that Loren approaches photojournalism is the way he approaches life itself: he works and works on it until he excels.” About his work on the border, Mr. Elliott said, “If we are talking about zero tolerance and family separation, asylum seekers in general, the photography is of real moments of the fear and trauma that people are undergoing. There is a lot of responsibility for me as a photographer to not add to the trauma with my presence, by pointing a lens at them. My approach is to be a human first, and a photographer second.” Mr. Elliott said his childhood in West Marin played a role in his desire to cover border issues. “I had a lot of really dear, close friends who were the children of Mexican immigrants, who had loved ones who were undocumented,” he said. “I was up close to that struggle, and to the fear that they had to live with combined with the dependence of the economy in West Marin—as well as California—on the work of Hispanic immigrants, especially in the dairy industry, the agricultural industry. That contradiction shaped my motivation to try to illustrate the humanity of the people that are crossing the border.” The winning photographs can be found at pulitzer.org/winners/photography-staff-reuters-1.