The Invisible Stranger: The Patten, Maine, Photographs of Arturo Patten
by: Russell Banks and Arturo Patten

Hardcover. NY, Harper, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 80 pages. 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.