Virginia McGee Richards: The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along A Southern Waterway

The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along A Southern Waterway by Virginia McGee Richards, printed by The MIT Press, is a deeply thought-about photographic and historic exploration of the waterways often called the Inner Passage within the South Carolina Lowcountry. For a few years, images has served as an vital instrument for recovering histories which have been neglected or deliberately forgotten, and Richards approaches this duty with outstanding care and attentiveness. Through images, oral histories, environmental analysis, and private reflection, she uncovers the largely untold story of canals constructed by enslaved Black males all through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for mercantile transport and plantation economies, however later utilized by enslaved individuals searching for freedom in Spanish Florida. Throughout the ebook, Richards demonstrates a dedication not solely to understanding this historical past but in addition to understanding the individuals and landscapes that proceed to hold it into the current. Her pictures and writing transfer past documentation alone, making a considerate meditation on the duty of preserving histories that proceed to form up to date life.

What makes the ebook particularly compelling is the best way Richards approaches the challenge with each historic rigor and deep care. Rather than documenting the waterways from a distance, she actually and figuratively immersed herself within the panorama to raised perceive the histories embedded inside it. Her sixty pictures of descendants related to the Inner Passage communities all through the South Carolina Lowcountry, the Sea Islands, and Charleston really feel grounded in belief and attentiveness, one thing made evident by means of her photographic methodology and the intimacy current inside the portraits.

Photographer and writer Virginia Richards first discovered of the Inner Passage waterway over a decade in the past whereas she was open-water swimming by means of New Cut canal. She commonly swims in Lowcountry canals and creeks after consulting tidal charts to verify she is shifting with the tidal present. The tides close to Charleston transfer over 5 toes of ocean water to and from the ocean by means of inland creeks. In the 1700s and 1800s boats touring by means of New Cut used the highly effective incoming and outgoing semi-diurnal tides to propel them to and from Charleston.

Metal buttons, previous clay pipes and different private objects relationship again lots of of years stay buried below this tree. The artifacts are from eighteenth and nineteenth-century vacationers who waited below the tree for the ferry to Charleston. The New Cut ferry, which docked on the base of the tree, carried individuals and their farm produce over twenty miles from Wadmalaw Island to Charleston.

Kathy Holmes has lived on a household property positioned on Successionville Road on James Island her total life. Her kids and grandchildren, in addition to a lot of her siblings and prolonged household stay close by.

Richards’ use of the moist plate collodion course of is especially efficient. The sluggish, labor-intensive photographic technique produces richly textured photos that visually echo the nineteenth century, permitting the previous to really feel current quite than distant. The course of itself requires persistence and precision, qualities that mirror the care Richards delivered to each her analysis and the relationships she constructed with the people and communities represented all through the challenge. The portraits carry a putting sense of dignity, whereas the environmental pictures maintain a haunted high quality that reminds viewers how deeply historical past stays embedded inside the land, even when bodily traces have disappeared.

From the 1700s till the early 1900s farmers dwelling on the ocean islands, equivalent to Wadmalaw Island, despatched their produce to Charleston on boats. This highway led to the New Cut ferry service.  This roadway, which seems on maps from the 1700s, nonetheless extends from New Cut canal by means of farmlands on Wadmalaw Island to the primary island highway.

Few maps of the Inner Passage existed within the 1700s. In colonial instances, vacationers and watermen navigated the Inner Passage route by memorizing the turns by means of water channels by means of the marsh. The boatmen steered by means of the waterway by counting creeks.

Alongside the pictures, Richards contains written reflections and private accounts that illustrate how reminiscence continues to maneuver by means of households and communities in the present day. One of essentially the most partaking points of the ebook is listening to descendants recount the tales they inherited and contemplating how these histories formed their understanding of themselves, their communities, and their relationship to the land. The ebook additionally quietly asks bigger questions on historic preservation and collective reminiscence: What duty do we now have in uncovering and sharing hidden histories? Who turns into accountable for carrying these tales ahead? How do storytelling, ritual, and on a regular basis practices enable the previous to stay alive throughout generations?

Navigating from Charleston southward on the Inner Passage required boats to journey from the Ashley River by means of Elliott’s Cut and Wappoo Cut to the Stono River. Rice plantations bordered both sides of the waterway with docks alongside the waterway to load rice, indigo and different crops destined on the market on Charleston’s wharfs. Eliza Pinckney Lucas’ Wappoo Plantation, the primary worthwhile indigo plantation, was positioned on this part of the Inner Passage within the 1700s.

Live oak tree branches develop horizontally outward and stability the tree’s construction throughout hurricane winds. The branches, which flip and twist throughout storms, can stand up to gale power winds of over 100 miles an hour. Ancient stay oak timber stood over the Inner Passage waterway when Indigenous canoes traveled the waterway, and in later centuries as Black watermen rowed boats carrying merchants, retailers, planters, and others alongside this water freeway.

This picket marker stands in a forested cemetery the place enslaved individuals had been interred at Hyde Park Plantation. Hyde Park Planation was a working rice plantation owned by the Ball household who lived on an adjoining property. Black descendants of individuals enslaved by the Ball household lived in a one room home near this cemetery till the mid-1900s. The cemetery overlooks the Cooper River which ends up in Charleston.

The contributed essay by Imani Perry, “Along This Way: Living History in Virginia Richards’ Lowcountry Photography,” gives an particularly significant framework for understanding the work. Perry writes that Richards “has chosen an ethical form of reverence,” a phrase that captures the spirit of the challenge effectively. Richards handles the subject material with sensitivity and care, by no means sensationalizing trauma or flattening the complexity of Southern historical past. Instead, the ebook emphasizes survival, resistance, and remembrance whereas acknowledging the immense violence that formed these waterways and the lives related to them. Her assertion, “The land remembers but cannot speak. By documenting the Inner Passage, I want to give the land a voice,” encapsulates the emotional weight and intention behind the challenge.

Quote from Deas Moore:

The solely means you may get to among the coastal islands in  South Carolina is by boat, leaving your automotive on the mainland. During the time of enslavement, Black staff reduce a canal

by means of the marsh between Sandy Island, South Carolina and the mainland, and even now everybody travels on a ship by means of that very same canal to achieve the island. The Sea Islanders who nonetheless stay there are the descendants of the rice world.

Ultimately, The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along A Southern Waterway succeeds as a result of it bridges environmental historical past, oral historical past, and images in a means that feels ethically ethical. It will not be solely a ebook concerning the previous, but in addition about how individuals proceed to stay with, protect, and interpret historical past within the current.

Quote by Laroche:

As a boy rising up on Wadmalaw Island, my uncle let me pilot a barge that traveled by means of the inland rivers and creeks. The first time I drove the boat, I misjudged a flip and grounded our barge on a sandbar. We needed to wait till excessive tide for the water to come back in and free us. My uncle navigated by means of the rivers and creeks utilizing a piecemeal map of the water route from Edisto to Charleston. He constructed the map himself by taping items of previous river

charts collectively in an extended strip. I nonetheless have that map.

Primeval cypress timber that grew in New Cut canal initially measured 30 toes in circumference. Today, leisure boaters and fishermen who navigate by means of the Inner Passage can see stumps from these felled cypress timber briefly emerge from the canal banks at low tide. The canal partitions are nonetheless shaped by pluff mud which has an anaerobic high quality that has preserved the cypress stumps for hundreds of years.

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Ginna McGee Richards is a photographer, researcher and former environmental lawyer whose work is rooted in nature and a way of place. Born and raised in North Carolina, she grew up surrounded by household, fields and the sluggish rhythms of Southern life. This intimate connection to land and historical past types the inspiration of her creative observe.

As a baby, Richards navigated a world that was each insulated and quickly shifting. She belonged to the primary technology of schoolchildren within the United States to attend racially built-in public colleges after a landmark Supreme Court determination. That expertise—of dwelling inside the private, political, and geographic complexities of the American South—quietly formed her lifelong curiosity about communities, boundaries and the hidden histories held in panorama.

Her critically acclaimed sequence The Inner Passage traces a largely undocumented community of seventeenth and 18th century canals constructed by Black enslaved laborers. Through years of fieldwork and archival analysis, she uncovered the environmental and human histories encoded in these waterways. Working with the wet-plate collodion course of and a cellular darkroom in distant marshlands, Richards creates photos that echo the fluid, unstable terrain they depict. “I want people to read the work as a visual poem,” she says, “to feel the land telling its own story”.

Her profession as an environmental lawyer noticed her work on the EPA and the Department of Justice, prosecuting environmental crimes and defending fragile ecosystems. “Landscapes are like manuscripts,” she says. “They record, they hold, and they can render histories—even in the absence of documents.”

Her present and ongoing challenge, Cultivators and Assassins, explores botanical lineage and the growers who protect heirloom seed traces, reflecting her persevering with curiosity in how dwelling methods carry reminiscence.

Across all her work one concept persists: the land remembers. Through her lens, images turns into each reverence and inquiry — a means of listening to put and uncovering the tales it holds.

Richards lives and works within the American South.

Instagram @viginiamcgeerichards

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MIT Press

Introduction by Imani Perry
Foreword by James Estrin
60 Photographs by Richards

MIT Press, distributed by Penguin Random House
Book Release: April 2026

Order the ebook HERE

Instagram: @mitpress

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Alayna N. Pernell (b. 1996) is an interdisciplinary artist, author, and educator from Heflin, Alabama. In May 2019, she graduated from The University of Alabama the place she obtained her Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art with a focus in Photography and a minor in African American Studies. She obtained her MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in May 2021. Her work displays the shared experiences of Black girls, notably these formed by the Deep South. Through images, textual content, and sourced supplies, she explores the psychological, bodily, and psychological toll of sustained publicity to seen and invisible injustice, discrimination and violence in each literal and metaphorical areas.

She has offered lectures about her work at numerous areas together with Texas Tech University, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, The Sheldon, and Syracuse University, amongst others. Her work has been exhibited in numerous cities throughout the United States, together with FLXST Contemporary (Chicago, IL), Refraction Gallery (Milwaukee, WI), JKC Gallery (Trenton, NJ), RUSCHWOMAN Gallery (Chicago, IL), Colorado Photographic Arts Center (Denver, CO), Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, MA), amongst a number of others. Her work is presently held in personal collections on the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Illinois State Museum.

Pernell was named the 2020-2021 recipient of the James Weinstein Memorial Award by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Department of Photography, the 2021 Snider Prize award recipient by the Museum of Contemporary Photography, a 2023 Mary L. Nohl Fellowship Emerging Artist recipient, and a 2024 gener8tor Art x Sherman Phoenix Artist. She was additionally acknowledged on the Silver Eye Center of Photography 2022 Silver List, Photolucida’s 2021 Critical Mass Top 50, and a 2021 Lenscratch Student Prize Honorable Mention, amongst others.

She is presently an Associate Lecturer of Photography and Imaging on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and serves because the Community Engagement Fellow on the Museum of Contemporary Photography. She can also be a Content Editor for Lenscratch and a yoga instructor.

Instagram: @alaynapernell