EXONERATED: This father-and-son photo of Kerry Max Cook, who spent 22 years on Texas death row before his innocence was finally revealed, is among the images by Diane Bladecki in a show opening Friday at the Arts Council of Princeton. Mr. Cook, who went to prison at 17 and was freed at 50, ended up using Ms. Bladecki’s photograph on the cover of a book about his journey. (Photo by Diane Bladecki)

At a performance in New York of the play The Exonerated about wrongfully committed prisoners, Diane Bladecki noticed that the photographs lining the lobby made their subjects look exactly like what they were not: criminals.

“They were too intense — horrible,” recalls Ms. Bladecki, who works with the Princeton-based Centurion Ministries, which is dedicated to vindication of the wrongly convicted. Ms. Bladecki, then an aspiring photographer, was at the play with Centurion’s director Kate Germond. “Kate said to me, ‘Think you can do better? Knock yourself out.’ So that was the beginning.”

Photographing exonerated prisoners, often at the heart-wrenching moment when their freedom is granted, has become Ms. Bladecki’s mission. The Princeton resident, a multimedia artist with a journalistic style, works for Centurion. Some 160 of her photographs, of varying sizes and mounted on wood, are the subject of “I am Innocent,” an exhibit opening Friday and running through October 22 in the Taplin Gallery at the Arts Council of Princeton.

“This isn’t pretty work,” she said this week. “I wanted it to look a little rugged. The easiest way to put all of the photos together was to mount them on wood. Some are big, three by four feet. Others are 10-by-10 inches. So it’s a real variety. It’s hard, because there are so many stories to tell. So many little pieces.”

Kerry Max Cook was among the cast members of The Exonerated, which starred a mix of former inmates and a rotating cast of professional actors. “He was the reason I got started,” Ms. Bladecki said of Mr. Cook. “He was staying at [actor] Aidan Quinn’s house. His little son was holding a badminton racquet, and I took a picture of him through the racquet, with his father behind him. It was eerie — it looked like his father was behind bars.”

Mr. Cook today does a lot of speaking about his ordeal. His story is only one of the many Ms. Bladecki has heard over the years. After photographing various events for about a decade, she worked her way up to attending actual exonerations — when wrongly convicted prisoners are freed following years of efforts on their behalf.  She began going to their homes and talking to their families. “A lot of times, we look at someone who is exonerated and that’s all we see, just that,” she said. “I like to dig deep and find out who they were before, who they were in prison and what they had to do to survive alongside people who did actual crimes. After 20 or 30 years in prison, they come out and they are lost. They don’t even know how to use a cell phone.”

The level of forgiveness among these former inmates has amazed Ms. Bladecki. “It’s just uncanny,” she said. “As one of them has said, ‘I can’t be angry. That’s like being in another prison. We can’t waste our time.’ “

Centurion was the first organization to defend people for crimes they didn’t commit. It can take from five to 15 years to free a wrongly convicted individual. “When it works, there is generally a court case where the judge decides the fate,” Ms. Bladecki said. “At that moment, the individual is told they will or they won’t be free. Recording when they are free, seeing them walk out of the courtroom, breathe the air, and maybe see the sky for the first time in years — it’s just amazing.”

Stories of the wrongly convicted are heartbreaking. There was the man who went to prison at 17 and was freed after 38 years, with no one left in his family to greet him and usher him back into the outside world. “It was just his attorneys and him, walking out,” Ms. Bladecki recalled. “He wept. As grateful as he was to be free, he didn’t know what he was going to do. Kate and Jim [McCloskey, Centurion’s founder] took turns letting him live with them till he got on his feet.”

In some cases, a single photo at the exhibit tells a story. Others take up more space. Mark Schand, freed after 27 years, is the subject of a whole series of photos showing a range of emotions as he walks out of prison. “He was lucky. He had a big family,” Ms. Bladecki said. “His wife visited him every week. He had three grown sons and a grandchild. He had survived a stroke. There were 50 people waiting for him.”

Photos in the show are meant to deliver an emotion, to make people experience the frustration of being wrongly accused, and convicted, of a crime. When visitors enter the exhibit, they will be given a number in exchange for their name — just like prison. A “Mug Shot Project” in which visitors can become part of the exhibit, a birdcage hung with names of prisoners Centurion is currently defending, and other features are part of the exhibit.

“The thing that gets me is that they are all like children,” Ms. Bladecki said. “There is no growth that happens in prison.”

Centurion has freed 54 people since its founding. Ms. Bladecki wants to tell all their stories and is thinking of doing a book. She would also like the exhibit to travel, particularly to Texas, where a lot of the clients are from.

In the meantime, she is looking forward to October 14, when several subjects of the exhibit and their families will visit Princeton to view the Arts Council show.