iPhonography at the fair
The 2011 North Carolina State Fair as seen from behind the screen of an iPhone 4 using Hipstimatic.
Hopscotch 2011
Scenes from the Hopscotch Music Festival, September 6,7 & 8 in Raleigh NC. Includes photos from: The Black Lips, The Love Language, The Flaming Lips, Future Islands, and Justin Robinson and The Mary Annettes
School Board in Turmoil
In 1976, after years of unpopular and failed proposals, North Carolina’s General Assembly merged Raleigh City schools with Wake County’s sprawling suburban school system in an effort to mitigate “white flight” and comply with court-mandated desegration. The district’s integration efforts eventually established a magnet program regarded a as a model for promoting balanced diversity in the classroom.
Today the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) is North Carolina’s largest public school district and the 17th largest in the United States with 143,289 students attending 163 schools during the 2010-11 academic year.
In 2009, an off-year election held in the county’s suburban outlying districts ushered in a Tea Party-backed school board majority that campaigned to end socioeconomic diversity based school enrollment. Promising their constituents neighborhood schools, the new conservative majority voted in 2010 to disregard the socioeconomic factors to determine school assignments.
“When you want to dismantle that, based on political ideology, not based on educational research, there’s something real wrong about that and we have to challenge it,” said North Carolina NAACP President William Barber.
Update – : January 13, 2011 U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, voiced his concerns for WCPSS in an editorial for The Washington Post.
Update – January 19, 2011: Wake County School Board member John Tedesco and the school system’s diversity controversy was the featured subject during The Colbert Report’s segment “The Wørd: Disintegration.”
Great 8 2010
Portraits from the 2010 edition of News & Observer’s “Great 8” spotlighting eight of the best and brightest music acts from the Raleigh Durham area. This year’s cast includes:
Credits:
Photography and lighting: Travis Long, Juli Leonard
From the Sidelines
Aside from rushing, interceptions and touchdown passes, a secondary drama is played out each fall Friday night on the sidelines of North Carolina’s high school football fields. It’s the place were plays are conceived, victories are realized, and tears are shed. Football above all other high school sports has a culture and drama that extends beyond two end zones.
!['I was surprised,' Bryan Evans said as he is crowned homecoming king at Chapel Hill High School. 'I thought my friend Tyrone was going to get it.' Evans and homecoming queen Ashley Banks were crowned by cheerleading coach Lisa Campbell, right, during halftime of Chapel Hill's game with Jordan High School. Chapel Hill won 12-11. 'The game was a pretty big win for us,' Evans said. 'Coach's [Issac Marsh] father had passed away and his funeral was that day. It was special to pull off a win. He needed it.'](http://www.travislongphoto.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/10.jpg "'I was surprised,' Bryan Evans said as he is crowned homecoming king at Chapel Hill High School. 'I thought my friend Tyrone was going to get it.' Evans and homecoming queen Ashley Banks were crowned by cheerleading coach Lisa Campbell, right, during halftime of Chapel Hill's game with Jordan High School. Chapel Hill won 12-11. 'The game was a pretty big win for us,' Evans said. 'Coach's [Issac Marsh] father had passed away and his funeral was that day. It was special to pull off a win. He needed it.'")
The Things They Left Behind
We’ll never fully know what the victims of Katrina lost. Six months ago, the storm tore apart houses, uprooted trees and shredded metal that still creaks in the wind. But it also shredded lives, strewing the personal effects of thousands of lifetimes across the Gulf Coast. A child’s photograph nailed to the wall of an empty New Orleans apartment. On the ground in Mississippi, the driver’s license of a man who drowned trying to ride out the storm. In a yard filled with debris, a bicycle twisted almost beyond recognition. Each artifact meant something to someone. Now these things have weathered the elements for months, caked in mud, becoming just more trash to shove into piles and haul away. Many can’t be traced to their owners. Most will never be claimed, but each one has a story.
Click images to enlarge:
Invisible Fields
After years of growth, the population of migrant workers is poised to become the dominant labor force on North Carolina farms. The reliance on migrants has been accompanied by a shrinking regard for the law on all sides — by thousands of workers who have entered the United States illegally from Mexico, and by many growers and contractors, who house workers in squalid camps and pay them substandard wages.
Barnstorm
Light paintings of tobacco barns in Cameron, NC. A New York artists’ collective made pilgrimages to Cameron for years to paint the barns.
Technical: Photographs were lit with halogen lights using long exposures.
