The culture of Georgia and South Carolina’s Sea Islands conjures imagery of old oak branches draped in Spanish moss, boot prints in thick pluff mud, and echoes of the sweetest low country spiritual. A place that feels both African and Caribbean, it is a culture rooted in maroonage and resistance. Beyond this, with its rice fields and ever-shifting coastlines that seem to vanish before our eyes, the Low Country holds an air of mysticism.

The Gullah Geechee people are descendants of West and Central Africans who were enslaved and brought to the southeastern U.S., and who, through isolation and resilience, preserved many of their African linguistic, spiritual, and cultural traditions. There is a proverb found within the Lowcountry: “The water bring we, the water wanna take we back…” This sentiment captures Gullah Geechee life not only as a culture but as an ecology of endurance—a way of being that withstands ongoing threats.

This work seeks to construct a visual narrative around that proverb, examining the rituals and spiritual practices within Geechee culture as they persist amid the pressures of rural gentrification on one side, and climate change on the other. The photographs explore how spiritual belief and religious lore act as forms of resistance, and how a sacred relationship between people, land, and sea continues to endure despite ongoing displacement.

A photographic meditation on the Hoodoo and conjure practices in the Low Country of the American South, the project focuses particularly on the Gullah Geechee Nation. Through a visual exploration of spiritual and cultural ties between Black communities, the land, and the sea, it aims to illuminate how ritual, belief, and ancestral memory endure—and even flourish—in the face of environmental vulnerability, cultural commodification, and historical disruption. Rooted in the landscapes of Georgia and South Carolina’s Sea Islands, the work moves through rice fields, marshlands, and sacred waters to trace the spiritual resilience of a people whose identity remains inseparable from place.