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. As a child, this fascinated me. The soil on which I was standing had at some stage been part of the ocean that was now contained by the dikes at the beach. And people had done this. What looked as it had existed forever had in fact not.
Over the course of my life, I have come back to this particular aspect of the relationship human beings have with the land time and again, mostly because I was trying to imagine the lives of the people who had in some fashion been engaging in it.
Inevitably, the work must have come at a sacrifice, possibly a major one. For example, it is estimated that during the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal (now located in russia), between one fifth and one fourth of the 125,000 prisoners who had to dig the canal with their bare hands died.
While swimming in a canal called New Cut in South Carolina, Virginia McGee Richards found herself wondering about its origins. “Naively, I thought that discovering New Cut’s origin story wouldn’t require much research grit,” she writes in the afterword of her new book The Inner Passage, “but there was no written history of New Cut anywhere.”
The eventual discovery would reach White Sea-Baltic Canal dimensions: “The few historical documents that I found revealed that my swimming hole at New Cut had been carved from the earth by enslaved Black men.” It would set in motion the photographic work that resulted in the book.
As it turned out, the new canal had not only served the colonialists/enslavers, it had also played a role for the enslaved people themselves. “Over a century before the advent of the Underground Railroad to the north,” the photographer writes, “enslaved Carolinians planned and carried out their own escapes by paddling three hundred miles southward on the Inner Passage”.
There is a list with such occurrences at the end of the book, listing enslaved and indentured people escaping in boats. It starts in 1671 with Dennis Mahoon and two others and ends in 1825 with eleven adults for whom only first names are given (“Jemmy, Adam, Keating, …”) and “5 children”. No dates were found for Mowby and Dunmore who also escaped at some stage.
The moment you know something about whatever it is you’re looking at — the land, a person, an item, it becomes charged: you want to see what you know in what is in front of you. But the surfaces of the land, people, or things do not reflect anything other than the light that falls upon them. Still, it’s impossible not to see more — and to find traces of that which invisible in what is visible.
This is where and how photography acquires its own power. Photography is not interesting because it shows things as they are. Photography is interesting because we see or feel something reflected in them. It is the photographer first who picks up on the traces of what they are looking for, and these discoveries are then transmitted to the viewers.
For her work around New Cut, Virginia McGee Richards used using a large-format camera and the wet-plate collodion process. The process is difficult to control, especially when used out in the field. It lends itself to all kinds of artifacts and possible imperfections. For me, its imagery evokes the swampiness that I imagine to be so pervasively present along New Cut and its immediate environs.
It would go much too far to claim that The Inner Passage is being brought to life by the inclusion of its portraits. Still, if the landscapes and the photographs of houses and other structures lay the fuse, the portraits light it. Next to the portraits, there are the names of the sitters and their larger place in the story.
Looking at another person’s photographic likeness throws a wrench into how we approach photography. After all, the person in the picture might talk back and offer something that differs from what we project onto them.
For many of the portraits, there also are the sitters’ words, which reflect how they see what we viewers, possibly far removed from the scene, think we encounter. “I hear and understand the history of the Civil War differently,” Hilary Green says, “because I sat on porches and listened to the oral stories from my kin.”
“I remember sitting on my grandfather Asbury Mitchell’s lap when I was a boy in the 1950s,” Lloyd Mitchell remembers, ” he was an old guy — about eighty or ninety years old.”
And so it turns out that the traces of those enslaved people who had to dig that canal live on not just in the artifice they created in the land. It also lives forth in their descendants who walk among us (at least if you live in the United States).
In the end, it will always be people’s stories that will move us more than monuments set in stone or dikes piled up near an artificial waterway.
We have to listen to those stories because only then will we have an opportunity to do better than those who came before us.
Recommended.
The Inner Passage; photographs and text by Virginia McGee Richards; essays by Imani Perry and James Estrin; 152 pages; The MIT Press; 2026
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