Book Reviews
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Black+White Photography, Issue #315, Feature: “The Land Remembers”
“McGee Richards’ new book, The Inner Passage, brings together her photographs of landscapes altered by slavery and portraits of Lowcountry descendants, all taken using wet-plate collodion, a mid-19th-century photographic process used by the Civil War photographer Matthew Brady.”
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Lenscratch, Review: The Inner Passage
“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…”
Read the review here. -
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Ron Charles’ Substack, Review: The Inner Passage
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.”
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Foreword, Review: The Inner Passage
“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.”
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Conscientious Photography Magazine, “The Inner Passage”
“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.”
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Hyperallergic, “10 Art Books for your Spring Reading List”
“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.”
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Garden & Gun, “A Charleston Historian Used an Antique Photography Method to Blur Past and Present, with Stunning Results”
“‘The Inner Passage,’ Virginia McGee Richards’s new book and photo project, shines an otherworldly light on a canal system dug by enslaved hands.”
Read the article here. -
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Charleston Mercury, Review: The Inner Passage
“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.”
Updates
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2026 New York Portfolio Review
The Inner Passage photographs.
Event sponsored by The New York Times and Photoville. -
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MIT Press to publish ‘The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway’ in April 2026
“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 WorldLearn more about the book
Pre-order the book at MIT Press -
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Two images chosen for the Second Annual Plein Air Exhibition (Juried Competition) at North Carolina Museum of Art
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” -
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2022 Gold Medal Prize, Lowell Thomas Competition, for photographs from The Inner Passage series that were published in in Smithsonian Magazine.
“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.”
