Leah Sobsey on the Durham Bulls

Chapel Hill-based photographer Leah Sobsey, and a whole bunch of writers and other folks, have spent the summer reflecting on the phenomenon of minor league baseball, and specifically on the phenomenon of minor league baseball as played in Durham, NC, by the Durham Bulls.

Leah has been helped by another fine photographer from North Carolina, Tim Telkamp. They have come up with some of the most distinctive sports photography one is likely to see this summer, or any other summer, for that matter. 

Their work -- photographs and essays -- have been appearing in the Paris Review, and you can see their work, here, in a long series of articles under the general title Bull City Summer.

 Some of you will remember the Durham Bulls as the subject of the movie Bull Durham, widely hailed as the best baseball movie ever. That movie came out back in 1988 and gave Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Kevin Costner, and the Durham Bulls major boosts to their careers.
  
The Durham Bulls now play in a nifty new ball park, and are a Triple-A team, no longer the Single-A team of the movie, but baseball is still baseball, an iconic activity in American culture, always worth contemplating in its forms and movements and characters and settings.

 
Here, at the end of summer in 2013, check this out. 

Nowhere else, for example, will you find tintypes of baseball team mascots or a discussion of how William Eggleston would have photographed a baseball game.