![]() … Southern land is so rich in violence, ambition, hope.” I’ve been photographing the waterways, and there are ‘witness trees’ that were present when the Inner Passage was used. “For me the story is about the land speaking its history,” Richards said. ![]() The tree is a visual poem, Richards believes, giving the land a voice. For 400 years, the magnificent oak has stood witness over the Inner Passage as generations of people passed beneath. The dark lines of huge limbs contrast with gray wisps of Spanish moss that appear to be blowing in a breeze. In one photo, a soaring live oak fills the frame, its sprawling branches gnarled by age. Most photographs focus on the canals still etched into the salt marsh, and surrounding land and trees of the Lowcountry region of coastal South Carolina. Richards created the photos for the project through a vintage process called wet-plate collodion. The College of Charleston will install large copies of her photos in an outdoor exhibit during its 2022–23 academic year, accompanied by poems written by students whom Richards invited to view and learn about the Inner Passage. Smithsonian Magazine recently showcased Richards’ project in an article by Imani Perry, an African American studies professor at Princeton University, who wrote that Richards is “gracious, even self-effacing, but her curiosity is luminous.” The Inner Passage served as a trading route for wealthy planters - and later, in a twist of fate the landowners surely never envisioned, as an escape route for Black people fleeing slavery. Augustine, Florida, composed of natural rivers and tributaries connected by dozens of 10-foot-deep canals such as the New Cut, which enslaved people dug by hand through cypress swamps, marsh and mud. In a region that prides itself on remembering, Richards uncovered a largely forgotten story: that of the Inner Passage, a 300-mile waterway from Charleston to St. That one simple question launched Richards on a 10-year odyssey of research and discovery. Though it connected the Wadmalaw and Stono rivers - two names derived from Native American dialects - the channel she was swimming in was called New Cut. Ginna McGee Richards ’90 (JD) created the images in this story using a time-consuming 19th-century photography method called wet-plate collodion.Ĭan landscapes become a living map of history?Īs Ginna McGee Richards ’90 (JD) drifted on her back in a creek near Charleston, South Carolina, cooling off from the summer heat, her thoughts also drifted. Used to link existing bodies of water, “cuts” were hand-dug by enslaved people using shovels, picks and axes. New Cut, a mile-long channel constructed on the Inner Passage by enslaved people in the late 1600s. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |