Virginia McGee Richards & James Estrin in Conversation: The Inner Passage (Online)

@ The Griffin Museum is pleased to host an online conversation with artist, photographer, researcher, and former environmental lawyer Virginia McGee Richards, joined by James Estrin, staff photographer and writer at The New York Times, to discuss Richards’ recently published book The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway. The Inner Passage will be published by MIT Press in April 2026. The work uncovers a little-known chapter of American history: a 300-mile network of colonial-era canals carved by enslaved people along the Atlantic coast from Charleston, SC, to St. Augustine, FL. These waterways later became a covert route to freedom, providing thousands of enslaved people with a safer passage than land-based routes. Over the past decade, Richards has photographed these landscapes using a large-format wooden camera and the 19th-century wet-plate collodion process—its alchemical unpredictability echoing the watery, shifting environments she documents. The book will feature 60 photographic plates alongside stories from Gullah Geechee and Indigenous families, as well as generations of watermen and women whose lives remain bound to these waterways. The Inner Passage brings together technically rigorous analogue photography, a contemporary documentary sensibility, and a powerful historical narrative exploring labor, resistance and landscape. Join us online on May 6 at 7:00 pm for this illuminating conversation to learn more about the project, its evolution into book form, and the layered histories held within these landscapes. © Virginia McGee Richards © Virginia McGee Richards © Virginia McGee Richards © Virginia McGee Richards © Virginia McGee Richards © Virginia McGee Richards © Virginia McGee Richards © Virginia McGee Richards © Virginia McGee Richards About the Speakers Virginia McGee Richards is a photographer, researcher, and former environmental lawyer whose work explores landscape as a living archive. Born and raised in the Carolinas, she grew up immersed in Southern geographies and rural life—formative experiences that anchor her artistic practice. “Landscapes are like manuscripts,” she notes. “They record, they hold, and they can render histories—even in the absence of documents.” She belongs to the first generation of American schoolchildren to attend racially integrated public schools following federal desegregation orders—an experience that deeply informed her interest in communities, boundaries, and the layered histories embedded in place. https://www.ginnarichards.com/ @virginiamcgeerichards James Estrin has been a staff photographer and writer at The New York Times since 1992. He was a founder and editor of Lens, the photography blog The Times published from 2009 to 2019 and was an originator of the New York Portfolio Review. James was part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for “How Race Is Lived in America.” He was also the co-executive producer of the documentary f...