caroline gutman

Indigo in America is haunted by a painful past. History credits an 18th century slaveholder’s daughter with planting the first indigo seeds in South Carolina, transforming the plant into a lucrative cash crop. 

Until the American Revolutionary War, indigo dye accounted for 25 percent of all exports from the American colonies, the second largest cash crop after rice. But behind the allure of “blue gold” (as it was known) and mass wealth creation fueled by this commodity, enslaved people carried out the backbreaking work of cultivating, fermenting, and processing the crop into dye. 

Indigo thrived out of the inhumane and immoral treatment of Africans and African Americans. Like cotton, indigo carries inseparable links to centuries of American chattel slavery. 

Today, women in the Lowcountry have revived indigo cultivation and dyeing, building diverse communities of textile artists and farmers. “Indigo is the voice of our ancestors,” textile artist Arianne King Comer has said. Children of Indigo explores how the commodity and its dye fueled slavery in the American colonies. 

The project shows the remaining historical sites in contrast with contemporary textile artists and farmers confronting indigo’s difficult past and reclaiming it.

Published in Smithsonian Magazine and National Geographic

Exhibited at Photoville and Charleston City Gallery

Supported by The Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting

Reporting by Latria Graham and Caroline Gutman, photo editing by Quentin Nardi, creative direction