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Photo Book

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By Virginia McGee Richards

Publisher: MIT Press
Publication date: April 2026
Print length: 200 pages
Language: English
Price Range:
This book is both a work of remembrance and an act of recovery, illuminating a chapter of American history long buried beneath water, soil, and silence.

At its center is the Inner Passage, a network of early colonial canals carved into the Lowcountry of South Carolina in the early 18th century. Built through forced labor, these waterways were intended to serve mercantile shipping and plantation economies. Yet history holds a profound reversal: for more than a century, enslaved Black people transformed these canals into routes of resistance, using them to move southward toward freedom in Spanish Florida.

Virginia McGee Richards brings this forgotten history into focus through sixty richly textured tritone photographs that trace landscapes still marked by slavery’s imprint. Swamps, waterways, and quiet stretches of land become witnesses, while intimate portraits of Lowcountry descendants connect past and present with dignity and depth. Her photographs do not merely document place; they listen, revealing how memory lingers in altered terrain and inherited stories.

An essay by Richards recounts her own discovery of the Inner Passage, unfolding like a personal and historical excavation. Complementing this, Imani Perry contributes a powerful reflection on traveling the same waterways, situating Black resistance within a living Southern landscape. Her words insist on presence—on seeing escape, ingenuity, and defiance as central to American history rather than its margins.

James Estrin’s foreword draws on decades of photographic insight, framing the work as an example of how images can function as testimony, evidence, and invitation all at once.

Bound in a finely crafted hard cover with a tip-in and lush tritone printing, this book is as carefully made as the story it tells. It stands as a visual and narrative map—one that honors those who endured, resisted, and found pathways to freedom where none were meant to exist.
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