Ron Charles, former editor of Washington Post Book World, reviewed The Inner Passage in his Substack.

“When written history falls silent, the land remembers.

Virginia McGee Richards discovered that silence when she began looking for the origins of New Cut, a canal in South Carolina’s Lowcountry.”

Read the review here.

“Portraits like fisherman-artist Sherman Mack, who docks his boat in the Inner Passage and paints its gravestone-dotted shores, tracing his lineage, or Kathy Holmes, linking six generations to 1830s James Island matriarch Molly Fludd — whose clan still gathers annually to honor the passage — breathe life into this poetic archive.”

Read the review here.

“In an interview — edited for length and clarity — Richards discusses the origins of her project; the slow, tactile nature of her photographic process; and America’s “tendency to ignore the importance of Black labor to the infrastructure of our entire country.” She argues, “It’s important to be willing to look at things that make you feel uncomfortable.””

Read the interview here.

“I didn’t intend to spend ten years searching for one man’s name.

My obsession began in a tidal creek where I went to swim in South Carolina. It was the summer I was pregnant with my fourth child and I longed for a quiet escape from Charleston’s tourist-swarmed streets…”

Read the story here.

“The images have a timeless, sometimes ghostly, quality that connects the past and present. In some, live oaks or “witness trees” tower over the islands after hundreds of years, their leaves looking like a mist in the colorless images. Old canals still connect lowland areas, and former plantation homes and loose cinderblocks look like ancient ruins reclaimed by nature.”

Read the review here.

Virginia McGee Richards, author and photographer, will present The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway on April 28 at 6 p.m. at the Charleston Library Society, in partnership with the International African American Museum and Buxton Books. Herb Frazier, an author of books on Black culture who is featured in the book, will also speak.

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“There is a waterway in the South Carolina Lowcountry that swells with centuries-old untold stories. Called the Inner Passage, it was dug by enslaved people to serve plantations, but by the grace of history’s irony, it also helped them escape to their freedom in the Spanish Florida.”

Read the article here.

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCBD) – Tonight, we are excited to welcome author Virginia Richards, who will discuss her new book about the waterway built by enslaved people, and its connection to Charleston all the way to St. Augustine.

Watch the interview to learn about Richards and her new book.

“My first exposure to the idea that the land was not merely some immutable background people were operating against came from the very place I grew up in: the part of the city where I was born had been wrested (“reclaimed”) from the sea.”

Read the story here.

The Inner Lens Issue #1, February 2026

Feature story on The Inner Passage, read the story here.

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”.

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.

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.

“About a decade ago, Richards—who grew up in Charlotte and lives there still—was swimming in a South Carolina creek when she was struck with a question: How did this channel come to be?”

Read the story here.