Virginia “Ginna” McGee Richards is a photographer, researcher and former environmental lawyer based in the American South. Born and raised in North Carolina, she worked as an environmental lawyer at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice, where she prosecuted environmental crimes, before turning to photography. Her work explores the connections between landscape, history and memory, often using the wet-plate collodion process and a mobile darkroom.
Since 2021 she has been a Photojournalism Fellow at Anderson Ranch in Aspen. Her work has been exhibited at the North Carolina Museum of Art, The Light Factory in Charlotte and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. In 2022 she received a Gold Medal in the Lowell Thomas competition.
Her book The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway (The MIT Press, 2026) grew from fifteen years of work along a waterway in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Some of its canals were dug by enslaved men in the 1700s, and for more than a century enslaved people used these waters to travel south toward freedom in Spanish Florida. The book combines 60 photographs with her historical research, an introduction by Imani Perry and a foreword by James Estrin.
