The invisible stranger
Subtitle: the Patten, Maine, photographs of Arturo Patten
By: Russell Banks, Arturo Patten.
Contributors: Patten, Arturo.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 1999
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 73
Subjects: Patten, Arturo -- Exhibitions; Landscape -- Maine -- Patten Region (Town) -- Pictorial works -- Exhibitions; Patten (Me. : Town) -- Social life and customs -- Pictorial works -- Exhibitions; Patten (Me. : Town) -- Biography -- Pictorial works -- Exhibitions
Description: In this unique collaboration, Arturo Patten, one of the most important portrait photographers of our time, and acclaimed writer Russell Banks visit the hardscrabble north country of Patten, Maine, to study its inhabitants. Patten's haunting portraits of the town's residents evoke characters who exist in Russell Banks's fiction.

Banks, the author of Cloudsplitter, The Sweet Hereafter, and Affliction, observes Patten's "characters" from his remote cabin in the Adirondack hills of upstate New York, where he surrounds himself with the thirty-seven portraits and contemplates what they tell us about Patten, Maine, about portraiture, and ultimately about ourselves. The Invisible Stranger, therefore, becomes nothing less than a meditation on what it means to be human.