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 is a groundbreaking photographic and historical project by Charleston-based photographer Virginia McGee Richards, published by MIT Press in April 2026. The work uncovers a little-known chapter of American history, revealing a 300-mile network of colonial-era canals—called “cuts”—dug by enslaved people between 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 covert routes to freedom. Offering thousands of enslaved people safer and faster passage than overland paths, the canals embody resilience, resistance, and ingenuity. Richards’ project illuminates this hidden history, bringing to life landscapes that have long been overlooked in official archives.

Over the past decade, Richards has documented these canals, rivers, and surrounding environments using a wooden large-format camera and the 19th-century wet plate collodion process. This analogue technique, with its alchemical unpredictability, mirrors the shifting, fluid nature of the waterways themselves. The project also includes aerial plates of the Stono River, created by translating digital images into collodion to maintain the series’ visual coherence.

The result is a deeply meditative exploration of place, labour, and memory. Each image allows the landscape to ‘speak’ for itself, revealing traces of human activity, endurance, and resistance that official histories often neglect. The Inner Passage merges rigorous technical craftsmanship with contemporary documentary sensibilities, presenting a fresh lens through which to view America’s intertwined histories of oppression, survival, and the natural environment.




About the Artist:
Virginia McGee Richards is a photographer, researcher, and former environmental lawyer whose work explores landscape as a living archive. Born and raised in North Carolina, she grew up immersed in Southern geographies and the slow rhythms of rural life—formative experiences that anchor her artistic practice. “Landscapes are like manuscripts,” she notes. “They record, they hold, and they can render histories—even in the absence of documents.”

She belongs to the first generation of American schoolchildren to attend racially integrated public schools following federal desegregation orders—an experience that deeply informed her interest in communities, boundaries, and the layered histories embedded in place.
www.ginnarichards.com