Book Review: Encounters by Patrick Stull #review

Title: ENCOUNTERS
Author: Patrick Stull
Publisher: Independent
Pages: 250
Genre: Fine Art Photography Book

BOOK BLURB:

With photography at its base, Stull offers a nuanced explication of his encounters to allow the viewer an opportunity to form a relationship with his art. While looking within ourselves, exploring our own feelings, he hopes that he will inspire greater humaneness in response to his art.

ENCOUNTERS is the second in a series of six large-format books in which artist, photographer and author, Patrick Stull explores a wide range of experiences. Using light and the physical body, the written word and his artistry he creates imagery that examines aspects of the lives of women.

Compiled over the last 18 years, the images in ENCOUNTERS, Stull says, are meant to “inspire and challenge the observer while always empowering the subject.”

Stull brings a powerful sense of the surreal and the spiritual to his work as he plots a course along the many paths of the human experience. His imagery runs from the ghostly and ephemeral to the flowing and fiery.

As much as he concentrates on the human form, Stull never forgets to focus on the humanity of his subjects. His choice of the coffee-table style book format draws the viewer into an experience both intimate and universal.

Stull’s first book in his series, titled EVOLVE, was published in 2006. A third book, titled HIDDEN DIMENSIONS, is completed and awaiting publication. Future titles in the series include DHARMA, BEING DIFFERENT, and YOGA, A HEALING MOMENT.

Stull hopes that his readers come away from the book with “a love for art and a respect for the female who gives us life and challenges us to be better human beings.

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An extraordinary book filled with exquisite photographs of women (and men) depicted in unusual positions that only a photographer with a fine eye for beauty and the unusual can detect. That's how I would sum up Patrick Stull's new art/photography book, Encounters.

Frankly, I have never found a book ever like this one. I love art and I love photography and while leafing through the pages, my 'artist' mind takes over. What looks like ordinary women (and men), it goes much further than that. It takes a creative mind to see it. This would make a great coffee table book to create conversation when someone comes over and would also make a great gift for someone who appreciates fine art. 

Keep in mind there's a lot of nudity but it's very tasteful. If you would like to step into the surreal, this book does so in a way you never would have thought possible.