Inner Passage

Virginia Richards is an award-winning documentary photographer, historian, and environmental lawyer.

Included in Publishers Weekly's Spring 2026 Fiction & Nonfiction Preview"A deeply considered photographic and historical exploration of the waterways known as the Inner Passage in the South Carolina Lowcountry...Throughout the book, Richards demonstrates a commitment not only to understanding this history but also to understanding the people and landscapes that continue to carry it into the present. Her photographs and writing move beyond documentation alone, creating a thoughtful meditation on the responsibility of preserving histories that continue to shape contemporary life."—Lenscratch"The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway by Virginia McGee Richards provides a visual history of the Intracoastal Waterway that runs between Massachusetts and East Texas, which enslaved men and women were forced to build but which they also used to escape to freedom in South Florida." —Publishers Weekly"They’re the kind of photographs and stories that stay with you for a while." —Hyperallergic"The Inner Passage is a memorable photography collection with insights into an important region and the people formed by it."—Foreword Reviews, STARRED REVIEW"Richards’s The Inner Passage...shares her research findings alongside sixty hypnotizing images in cloud-colored whites and deep, inky blacks." —Garden & Gun"Virginia McGee Richards gives a voice to the trees and topography that witnessed traumatic events of the past in the lowland waterways of coastal South Carolina in her book The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway..,Her dramatic images exude a wistful sense of wonder at the past, as if to ask who lived and toiled in the thick, humid air of these wetlands...With a detailed history written by Imani Perry, this book skillfully combines editorial research with eloquent photography to produce a work that is intellectually rigorous and emotionally expressive. " —What Will You Remember?"The Inner Passage, then, is an incredibly thoughtful, compelling, and multisensory work of photography, history, geography, and oral tradition that invites an inspiring and sometimes uncomfortable glimpse into the Carolina Lowcountry. While this book will have obvious appeal to historians and archivists, the book deserves wide readership for its creative and successful attempt at making history tangible in the present."—The Photobook Journal"And so it turns out that the traces of those enslaved people who had to dig that canal live on not just in the artifice they created in the land. It also lives forth in their descendants who walk among us (at least if you live in the United States). In the end, it will always be people’s stories that will move us more than monuments set in stone or dikes piled up near an artificial waterway. We have to listen to those stories because only then will we have an opportunity to do better than those who came before us. Recommended." —Consciousness Photography Magazine"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."—AllAboutPhoto.comENDORSEMENTS“Making brilliant use of an old photographic process, Virginia Richards has soulfully summoned a heartrending past. What a vital and astonishing book! Through landscape and portraiture, it speaks, and haunts, and sings.”—Robin Kelsey, author of Photography and the Art of Chance “Virginia McGee Richards’ breathtaking photographs visualize histories of Black resistance and resilience, while transcending time and powerfully reminding us that the past is an indelible part of the present.”—Steven Nelson, coeditor, Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World

• ContentsForeword: On the Photographs by James EstrinIntroduction: Along This Way: Living History in Virginia Richards’ Lowcountry Photography by Imani PerryPortfolio of Photographic PlatesSwimming in History at New Cut Canal by Virginia McGee RichardsList of Enslaved and Indentured People Escaping on the Inner PassageAcknowledgmentsBibliography