Photographer Virginia McGee Richards announces the release of The Inner Passage, published by MIT, which features 60 photographic plates, alongside stories from the communities who continue to live along the Inner Passage: descendants of the Gullah Geechee, Indigenous families, Lowcountry planters, and generations of watermen and women whose lives remain connected to these waterways. Their voices, combined with the photographs, provide a layered narrative that brings together environmental history, lived memory and contemporary cultural presence.

The Inner Passage uncovers a little-known chapter of American history: a 300-mile network of colonial-era canals—known as “cuts”—carved by enslaved people in the 17th and 18th centuries along the Atlantic coastline from Charleston, South Carolina to St. Augustine, Florida. These waterways, built through immense labour and environmental transformation, later became a covert route to freedom, offering thousands of enslaved people a faster and safer passage than land-based paths.

Over the past decade, Richards has documented these canals, rivers and surrounding landscapes using a wooden large-format camera and the 19th-century wet plate collodion process whose alchemical unpredictability mirrors the watery, shifting world she sought to capture. This process allows the
landscape to ‘speak’ for itself revealing traces of histories that remain largely unrecorded in official archives. The series also includes an aerial plate of the Stono River, created by translating a digital image into collodion to maintain the unity of the project’s visual language.

The project offers a fresh visual and historical perspective on America’s intertwined histories of labour, resistance, resilience and landscape. The project also presents a rare combination: a technically rigorous analogue photographic process, a contemporary documentary approach and a powerful, under-examined historical subject.

https://www.ginnarichards.com/the-inner-passage
@virginiamcgeerichards