The Inner Passage
An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway
Photographer Virginia Mcgee Richards documentary text The Inner Passage shows how history altered a region and its people over centuries.
The Inner Passage, introduced here as a series of canals and rivers along the coastline of South Carolina leading to Florida, was built by enslaved people in the 1700s. This low-country area became home to Gullah Geechee people, who kept West African traditions alive in the colonial United States. The passage itself, the book notes, was often a route to escape from enslavement to then Spanish Florida.
“My hope is that images can convey a landscape scarred with secrets,” Richards asserts, “where on rare mornings an ethereal mist rises off fields to meet the certainty of past violence held by the soil.” Her painstaking “wet-plate collodion” photography process involves exposing a piece of chemically treated glass and developing it in a portable darkroom. More than sixty such images appear herein in black and white.
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. Along with these stills, the book includes individual portraits of a few of the area’s residents, some descended from enslaved Americans. The blurry backgrounds behind them make their faces stand out all the more, and the book includes anecdotes from some subjects about life near the waterway, as well as stories passed down through generations.
The Inner Passage is a memorable photography collection with insights into an important region and the people formed by it.
Reviewed by
Jeff Fleischer
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