“The South, of course, is not what it once was.”

Many photographers have documented the American South, and the region’s archives reveal scenes of people and places now familiar—rural landscapes, tobacco factories, sharecroppers, the hard-working poor—classic images Marion Post Walcott, Walker Evans, and many others have preserved with powerful lenses.

The South, of course, is not what it once was. Many southerners are transplants or immigrants, and industry and business shape the region like never before. These and other changes throughout the South necessitate a contemporary documenting of the region. This need provided Gyoung-Youl Jeong—a Korean journalist and visiting scholar at UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South—with the inspiration for “Kure Beach to Asheville: Snapshots from North Carolina’s i-40 Corridor.” Here, Jeong interprets through a modernizing lens the sights along the state’s longest highway from coastline to mountain country. In so doing he provides a valuable update to our images of the South.