Incarceration changed their lives. Their photographs explore how.

When Vernon Ray was incarcerated, he sold hand-drawn portraits for $12.

He said he always saw himself as an artist, drawing and painting ever since he was growing up in Strawberry Mansion, experimenting with different mediums, colors, and composition. Once he was inside, others gave him photos of their family members, and Ray would draw their portraits onto cards. It gave him something to do, and he used the extra money to buy snacks. But Ray said that drawing the portraits also gave him a sense of purpose.

“People started to see me different up there, and value me different,” he said. “Just that feeling of making somebody happy and seeing their loved ones drawn out was an addictive thing. And it was like, I like this feeling to be able to make people happy and recapture a moment.”

Ray was released in 2008 after three years inside, determined never to return. With the advent of the camera phone, he started taking pictures and decided to pursue photography as a career. Once, while he was making that transition as he worked for SEPTA, he was riding the train and took photos of moonlight hitting the tracks. His coworkers were impressed.

“I’m like, ‘Man, this is what I love to do.’”

Now, Ray is one of the featured photographers at a new exhibit by the TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image, “Wherever There Is Light.” The exhibit presents the work of four formerly incarcerated photographers — Ray, Akeil Robertson, José Díaz, and Don “Ike” Jones — who spent a year developing new work that explores the American carceral system and its effects on people and communities.

“Wherever There Is Light” opened on Thursday at TILT’s gallery, located at 1400 N. American St. The gallery is open Wednesdays to Saturdays from noon to 6 p.m., with free admission. “Wherever There Is Light” is supported by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage and will be on display until Dec. 31.

Over the last year, the artists met several times as a group and individually with Larry W. Cook, an interdisciplinary artist and associate professor of photography at Howard University, who started “Wherever There Is Light” in Los Angeles in 2020, and Melanee C. Harvey, the exhibit’s curator and an associate professor of art history at Howard University.

“This cohort, they’re a group of artists, first and foremost,” Harvey said.

She did not fill a traditional curator’s role for the exhibit, she said, but acted more like a sounding board for the artists as they sharpened their ideas. Cook worked closely with the men to explore and practice specific photography techniques, and TILT gave them financial support, space, and other resources to craft their visions.

Harvey said it was important to empower artists with carceral experience and provide them with tools to thrive. She strove for the exhibit to interrogate incarceration without fetishizing it.

“I took that as a charge for this exhibition to … take them as artists and think about how we can distill those experiences. Not only to highlight the gross injustices and inhumanity that is happening in U.S. jails, but also allow [visitors] to understand that [with] those experiences, we can connect to more universal themes of oppression,” she said.

Robertson’s photographs create ghostly effigies representing his anxiety that he could be sent back to prison at any moment.

Robertson was incarcerated for 10 years, entering prison when he was 19. He picked up photography and art for the first time while he was inside, and said it felt revolutionary to learn that art could be a learned skill. After he was released, he began the next part of his sentence: a 15-year probation.

“I have to ask to travel anywhere. I’m subject to urinalysis at any given time. My home can be entered at any given time,” he said. Robertson, now 34 and living in Olde Kensington, is five years into his probation, but said that if he violates it at any point he could be reincarcerated and have to start his probation all over.

“My parole status affects me in every single way,” he said.

» READ MORE: IN THE HOLE — How I ended up alone in a cell for 45 days by Akeil Robertson

His exhibit photos display prison “blues,” the light blue top and navy pant scrub uniform that inmates at his correctional facility wore. Robertson originally planned to wear the blues and photograph himself juxtaposed against Philadelphia’s predominantly white, wealthy spaces that are distant from incarceration — like Haverford College, where he is the creative director for the Graterford Archive Project, a digital archive and exhibition series about people’s experiences at Graterford Prison, which was replaced by State Correctional Institution Phoenix in Montgomery County.

But after he picked up a set of blues from a dry cleaner, he said, he was “awestruck” by how they looked inside their plastic bag, carefully pressed and presented as a precious object. When Robertson used to wear his blues every day, they were torn, stitched, and decidedly not precious.

“The paper sleeve around the hanger says, ‘We Love Our Customers.’ There’s something really ironic and poetic about that,” he said.

He traveled to different places in the country, and hung his blues off trees and other structures. Robertson said he wanted his photos to create tableaux reminiscent of lynchings.

“For me, the continued supervision and incarceration of Black people in this country is a continuation of that American legacy and history of the denigration and destruction of Black values,” he said.

Ray’s work for “Wherever There Is Light” is a series of self-portraits, centered on the self-esteem issues he dealt with after he came home.

“For me, to have to hear so many no’s and have to get turned away so much when I was trying to do right, it was really hard to stand tall in these situations,” he said. “I had to start believing in myself more.”

In some of the portraits, he is holding chess pieces. Part of it is a reference to the game he played in prison often, but also about what the pieces represent. One photo shows Ray holding a pawn, looking at himself in a mirror, but the reflection shows him holding a king.

“Understanding that I am the king that I say I am. So if I visualize myself as that important figure, that motivating figure, then I’ll become that. You are how you see yourself.”

Ray now conducts photography workshops called “Shoot Cameras Not Guns” to prevent gun violence by giving kids a creative outlet, and his 18-year-old son, Jabrill, is a photographer, too. Ray remembers when Jabrill was little, they would run around together with cameras.

“He would just be holding the camera, just looking like he’s doing what I’m doing,” he said. “And it just turned into him actually doing what I’m doing.”