The Durham Bulls recently announced the pre-sale of the limited-edition fine art book “Bull City Summer: A Season at the Ballpark and Beyond” starting July 24, 2013. Edited by Sam Stephenson and published by Daylight Books, Bull City Summer chronicles the 2013 Durham Bulls season. Featuring photography and essays, Bull City Summer will be a limited edition with 216 pages total and 129 fine art reproductions from nationally acclaimed photographers. Pre-sale orders can be made in the team’s online store and at the Ballpark Corner Store at the DBAP.
Writers involved in the project include Stephenson, Adam Sobsey, Howard L. Craft, and Allan Gurganus, and photographers Alex Harris, Frank Hunter, Kate Joyce, Elizabeth Matheson, Leah Sobsey, Alec Soth, Hank Willis Thomas, Hiroshi Watanabe, and Ivan Weiss. “The goal of the project,” said Stephenson, “is to converge on the stadium and its surroundings with a team of artists and documentarians and see what we find – stories, images – on the field and behind the scenes over the course of a season. The results will be a portrait of the art and craft and grit of baseball and the community that revolves around it in the ballpark and downtown Durham.”
Stephenson’s last project, The Jazz Loft Project, won a 2010 ASCAP-Deems Taylor award for its wide-ranging outcomes including a book, exhibition, website and public radio series. It also is the basis for a documentary film and a theatrical play that are currently in production. A longtime Triangle resident, Stephenson said, “The Jazz Loft Project concerned a building in New York City 1957-1965 obsessively documented by photographer W. Eugene Smith. For a decade it felt like I was living in 1959 New York City. By the end I was ready to live in 2013 Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, to document something happening here now, not New York fifty years ago.” Bull City Summer is the inaugural project of Stephenson’s new Rock Fish Stew Institute of Literature and Materials.
Lead sponsors for Bull City Summer include Triangle Orthopaedic Associates, the Durham Bulls Baseball Club, and Capitol Broadcasting Company.
Partners include the North Carolina Museum of Art, which will host an exhibition of works from Bull City Summer in the Spring of 2014, and Daylight Books, which will be publishing Bull City Summer.
Thanks to DBBC’s Scott Carter for this capcom story & photo.
