On Contentious Ground is a series of medium and large format still photographs that focuses on visitors to American Civil War sites and landscapes. What can images of visitors and these sights of reckoning tell us about our relationship to a past that was and continues to be formative for who we are as Americans? By picturing visitors in these spaces and how they interact and reflect on the memories of the past, I aim to capture the reverberations of the Civil War rippling into our time, as if to picture the long shadow the Civil War has cast onto today.