Reddit reviews Barlowe's Inferno

For those that are interested, this is from a book called Barlowe's Inferno.

http://www.amazon.com/Barlowes-Inferno-Wayne-Barlowe/dp/1883398363

It is amazing, not only are there gorgeous depictions of hell, but they have complex explanations of why they look the way they do. Souls are compacted into bricks to be used to build walls, or torn apart to be turned into sashes for demons.

Also interesting is his other art book Expedition, where an astronaut travels to an alien world and documents the flora and fauna in great detail and their life-cycle.

I love Wayne Barlowe's work so much, it is detailed, fantastical, organic, and sometimes terrifying. I spent a long time attempting to find and buy my rare copy of Wayne Barlowe's Inferno, and it was worth it. If you see it, buy it! I copied down the description from my copy of 'Barlowe's Inferno':

>The perimeters of Hell are salients to be watched over, borders of constant dispute with the Enemy From Above. They are a region of endless ebb and flow as characterized by the city-large blocks of buildings that float without direction over the smouldering landscape. Because of its sense or remove from the heart of Dis, I decided that extraordinary warning systems needed to exist to alert the armies of Darkness. These Watchtowers with their giant, bone-lidded orbs seem perfect for the job. Encrusted with barracks and other military buildings, appropriate to a hostile frontier, the archiorganic towers are the demons' first line of defense. Surmounting them are gaping jaws attached to long tubular necks that can swiftly extend to scoop up flying prey.

>Prowling around the Watchtowers are two Sphinx-like Beasts. Barely controllable, they are seen here sharpening their claws on the Watchtowers' flanks sending buildings, debris and demons showering to the ground below.

Wayne Barlowe is well known for his realistic paintings of surreal alien (or fantastic) life. His Barlowe's Guides to extraterrestrials and to fantasy are his interpretations of specific creatures and beings from well-known science fiction and fantasy literature. His Inferno is an interpretation of the demonology contained in the Grimoire of Honorius. His Expedition is a complex look of the speculative evolution of the fictional planet Darwin IV. - wiki

Wayne Barlowe's WordPress . Wayne Barlowe's IMDB (he worked on art for Avatar, Harry Potter, and other films)

Pure worldbuilding and minimal narrative describes pretty well Expedition and Barlowe's Inferno by Wayne Douglas Barlowe.
Granted, these are books where the framing story (a person exploring the setting in question) is there to provide context for Barlowe's paintings, but you can do pretty much the same thing with words as he does with illustrations- take an explorer, an archaeologist, a historian, or some other sort of researcher, and follow them as they acquire knowledge about the setting. The story will thus focus on their discoveries, rendering exposition and story one and the same.
The SCP Foundation's various exploration logs are the best examples of this that I can name at present, as the characters involved in the framing story are generally anonymous redshirts whose only significance is the strange phenomena they encounter. As far as novels go, I also see the general formula in Jeff Fahy's Fragment.

Another example of an approach that works is the SCP-Foundation. There are traditional narratives on the site, but the main attraction for most of the Foundation's existence has been the collection of fictional documents describing various paranormal phenomena.

A fictional document or fictional documentary strikes me as a perfect method of doing what you seek. You can have an in-universe history book, an in-universe encyclopedia, some other sort of reference work like the Zombie Survival Guide, etc. You could call some of these "stories" by some definition of the word, I guess, but the bottom line is the format and content are quite different from what you typically see in things described as stories.

Also, Barlowe's Inferno (for the work that started it all). He also wrote an additional book called God's Demon, fleshing out some more of the world he created with his paintings.

Edit: With Amazon links now!