Sam Stephenson’s Bull City Summer

Working with nine photographers, four writers, and one video artist, the North Carolina writer Sam Stephenson led the documentation, last year, of what turned out to be a championship season for the Durham Bulls, the triple-A baseball team made famous by the movie “Bull Durham.” It took Stephenson three years to put together the artists and acquire funding for the project, he told me. The resulting book, “Bull City Summer,” published in April by Daylight Books, captures not only the atmosphere at the games and in the stadium but also the complexities of being a minor-league baseball player.

During the team’s 2013 season, about a half-dozen photographers converged at Durham Bulls Athletic Park for each of their seventy-two home games. Many* of the photographers were Durham residents, and they were encouraged to pursue any aspect of the game that interested them. Alec Soth used a large-format camera to capture images of players and fans. Leah Sobsey used tintypes and focussed on the Durham staff. Hank Willis Thomas relied on his iPhone in an unsuccessful attempt to photograph every person who entered the ballpark.

“The artists were chosen because we admired and trusted them,” Stephenson said. “Nobody was given an assignment. The artists were allowed to find themselves within the frame of the ballpark.”

*Correction: A previous version of this post stated that the majority of the photographers were local; in fact, only some of them were.