“I have a reverence for the natural world”

Ginna McGee Richards is a photographer, researcher and former environmental lawyer whose work is rooted in nature and a sense of place. Born and raised in North Carolina, she grew up surrounded by family, fields and the slow rhythms of Southern life. This intimate connection to land and history forms the foundation of her artistic practice.

As a child, Richards navigated a world that was both insulated and rapidly shifting. She belonged to the first generation of schoolchildren in the United States to attend racially integrated public schools after a landmark Supreme Court decision. That experience—of living within the personal, political, and geographic complexities of the American South—quietly shaped her lifelong curiosity about communities, boundaries and the hidden histories held in landscape.

Her critically acclaimed series The Inner Passage traces a largely undocumented network of 17th and 18th century canals built by Black enslaved laborers. Through years of fieldwork and archival research, she uncovered the environmental and human histories encoded in these waterways. Working with the wet-plate collodion process and a mobile darkroom in remote marshlands, Richards creates images 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 career as an environmental lawyer saw her work at the EPA and the Department of Justice, prosecuting environmental crimes and protecting fragile ecosystems. “Landscapes are like manuscripts,” she says. “They record, they hold, and they can render histories—even in the absence of documents.”

Her current and ongoing project, Cultivators and Assassins, explores botanical lineage and the growers who preserve heirloom seed lines, reflecting her continuing interest in how living systems carry memory.

Across all her work one idea persists: the land remembers. Through her lens, photography becomes both reverence and inquiry — a way of listening to place and uncovering the stories it holds.

Richards lives and works in the American South.