The American Civil War remains a polarizing and formative event in American history and memory, one that still clearly marks a divisive fissure in The United States.  Every year, millions of Americans visit the sites where thousands of Americans fell fighting to either uphold white supremacy or to break the chains and give birth to a new freedom, one more closely aligned with the universality proposed by the framers of the U.S. Constitution: where all men are created equal.

 Not unlike many children who grew up along the eastern coast of The United States, my father often took us to different American historical sites during family vacations. Civil War sites held a certain amount of intense gravity, and their histories and stories commanded my attention as a child; the number of dead and suffering on and off the battlefield - unresolvable. Starting with an early fascination with the Civil War and continuing to today, my research and revisiting of these sites acts as a certain investigation into my own fascinations with the war, the Union, and the Confederacy while examining and interrogating individual and collective memories of the war. What can images of visitors and the landscapes tell us about our relationship to a past that was and continues to be formative for our stories as Americans? On Contentious Ground seeks to visually articulate the lasting effects the American Civil War has had on who we are and our memory of the past through shedding light on the war’s the lasting impact on individuals, families, and landscapes. By picturing visitors in these spaces and how they interact and reflect on the memories of slavery’s legacy and the cost of freedom for everyone in our nation, I aim to capture the reverberations of the Civil War rippling into our time, as if to measure the long shadow the Civil War has cast onto today.