Brad Vest is a freelance photojournalist based in Concord, N.H. He has spent the last several years working on “Adrift,” a project for his master’s thesis at Ohio University. The series documents the life of Travis, a father who is trying to put his life back together after being incarcerated. Mr. Vest, 27, was a photo intern at The New York Times last summer and at National Geographic last fall. In 2012 he won the prestigious Cliff Edom Award in NPPA’s Best of Photojournalism contest.

His Turning Point conversation with Peter Moskowitz has been edited.

Q.

What’s happening in this photo?

A.

This was the day Travis had just gotten out of jail. The whole series is about his past and how it has come back to make his future pretty difficult. The day was winding down and he was going in to eat dinner so he invited me in. We sat down to eat dinner and I figured since he’d been in jail for a while I wanted to do a nice family portrait of him and his two daughters together, because I like giving back prints to people I photograph.

Q.

How did this image change the way you shoot?

A.

From that first photo, I had no clue that our relationship would come to be caring so much about each other. He knows just as much about me as I know about him. I never really thought about how you go about having relationships with the subjects you photograph. There’s that saying in photojournalism, “being a fly on the wall.” That’s not really at all how I approached Travis and his family. I got to know him really well. Eventually it became that fly on the wall thing, just through knowing them so well it was almost expected that I would be there. He trusted me, I trusted him, and then it became a very natural thing to be there, photographing.

Jim Goldberg/Magnum Photo

Inspiration: “Raised By Wolves”

Photographer: Jim Goldberg

Represented by: Magnum Photos

Q.

Why did you choose this photo?

A.

It’s one of my favorite photographs from the book, but the inspiration that I got from him is really from the book as a whole experience. He spent about 10 years with the people in the photographs. There’s also Polaroids, and writings to him and from the subjects as well as writing about people’s daily lives. He’s got interviews, and ephemera that’s been scanned or photographed. It gets at so many different aspects that are hard to get at with just photography. I was doing that initially when I met Travis, but I didn’t realize it — I was collecting a few writings and drawings. I’d always ask: “Hey are you going to throw this out? Can I take it?”

You don’t have to actually take something away and scan it to collect it. It made me appreciate being in someone’s home and seeing how they live. The things they collect, the things on their coffee table, the things they hang on their walls, what they keep in small boxes and drawers that they never really look at but they can’t get rid of — people do that and it sort of reflects who they are. I think that makes me appreciate the people and their environments much more.

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