As a South African, Goldblatt has been on the receiving end of criminal activity on various occasions, which made him question, who are the people that do it? What are their lives? How do they come to it? What do they think and feel about what they have done and about their victims? What are their hopes and fears for their future? Goldblatt seeks to make photographs and tell life stories that might deepen our understanding of people and phenomena that we, who are not professionally engaged, tend to shrink from or to react to with fear and aggression. Goldblatt wants to see people who have committed crimes not as the sudden forces and threats that many of us have experienced, nor as names in news reports, but as individuals.

Goldblatt asks ex-offenders to go back to the scene of crime, or arrest, where he then takes their portrait. He asks them to do this in the hope that they will have a certain awareness of what they have come through and resolved, and perhaps of what they have not resolved, and that possibly something of that awareness might become manifest in the portrait. Goldblatt is not seeking to make dramatic photographs of offenders, nor does he wish to re-enact crimes. He wants to make straightforward portraits that are in some probably indefinable way, eloquent of something that was irrevocably life changing for them, their victims and their families. After the portrait is taken, the photographer asks each person to tell him their life story.