An accidental tourist joins a walking tour in Montgomery, Alabama on a sweltering, summer afternoon. Standing in front of a large, ornate fountain, she reads a historical marker and learns that the site was a slave market just a century past. Wrestling with its history, its significance, and its implications, Jessica Ingram begins a photographic sojourn that will lead her from Pulaski, Tennessee, where six men founded the Ku Klux Klan, to Money, Mississippi, where a 14-year-old boy was tortured and murdered for whistling at a white woman, to Jackson, the capital of the Hospitality state and where an activist was gunned down outside his home.

A Civil Rights Memorial is both a meditation and a recapturing. With the help of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the lead FBI agent charged with investigating Civil Rights era crimes, Ingram visited and photographed the sites of more than eighteen events that occurred during the 1960s and 70s, recontextualizing a southern landscape that at one time represented a nation’s fears, its hatred, and its shame.

Jessica Ingram received a B.F.A. in Photography and Political Science from New York University’s Tisch School for the Arts, and an M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts. Her photographs have been published in numerous books, including Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, by Deborah Willis and Hank Willis Thomas and 25 Under 25: Up-and-Coming America Photographers, edited by Iris Tillman.

Ingram’s work is directed by her desire to understand how people relate, what they long for, and what motivates the choices they make. She lives between Nashville and San Francisco.