The Inner Passage

The Inner Passage is an ancient inland waterway that runs for almost three-hundred miles along the U.S. Atlantic coastline from Charleston, South Carolina, to St. Augustine, Florida. Beginning in the late 1600s, the waterway was enhanced with the latest technology available—canals or water channels called “cuts” that offered a faster route than the existing narrow, muddy roads of the coastal frontier. Using simple shovels and axes, enslaved men cleared forests and excavated coastal mud to create this new waterway. From the late 1600s to the mid-1800s, enslaved people used the Inner Passage route to escape from Charleston to Florida where they were granted freedom by the Spanish government.

These contemporary photographs were taken on site with a mid-nineteenth-century photographic process called wet-plate collodion. The images ask us to consider how we visualize the past. Do events from hundreds of years ago leave a trace that can be seen from a new vantage point, or has the past disappeared entirely? Can landscapes become a living map of history?