“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

Learn more about the book
Pre-order the book at MIT Press

In March 2022, Virginia’s photographs and historical research on the Inner Passage was published as a feature article in the Smithsonian Magazine.

Read the Smithsonian piece “What the Haunting ‘Inner Passage’ Represented to the Enslaved”.

Visit the Smithsonian’s Instagram page featuring Ginna’s Inner Passage work for the week of March 21 - 27, 2022.

In March of 2023, the American Society of Magazine Editors awarded Ginna’s Inner Passage photographs a National Ellie award for best photographic feature story published in 2022.

October, 2022:
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina, Revēlō: Second Annual Plein Air Exhibition (Juried Competition)

Works:
“Vennie Deas Moore, historian and native of South Carolina”
”Witness Tree on the Wadmalaw”

“History is today, in Virginia Richards’ wet plate collodion prints. Dripping trees and fading grave markers speak of a tragic past, when enslaved people were forced to dig the Inner Passage, a waterway from South Carolina to Florida. These sad, eerie photographs show viewers ancient oaks, or “witness trees” that “witnessed” historic events, and a “burnt church” that is hundreds of years old.”

In August of 2022, the UNC Carolina Alumni Review magazine wrote about Ginna’s documentary photography and her historical research on Lowcountry waterways and landscapes.