#picturingprince

Today we’re celebrating the publication of Faerie Magazine's photo editor Steve Parke's gorgeous new tome, Picturing Prince: An Intimate Portrait, out today in the UK and around the world from Cassell/Hachette! (The U.S. edition will be out in September and features 16 bonus pages! And translation rights were just sold to Italy and Japan, too!)

Here's a copy of the book hanging out in a Baltimore bar:

You can order Steve's book from Amazon.co.uk no matter where you are: http://amzn.to/2nOvPwy. And of course find it wherever books are sold. There's a beautiful intro from Sheila E., too (as it happens, back in the late '80s it was bass player Levi Seacer Jr. -- whom Steve met through Sheila -- who introduced Steve to Prince, sharing Steve's art with the Purple One until he broke down and hired him)! The book has over 100 photos, many of which have never been seen, plus a number of charming vignettes about what it was like working, day after day, with Prince. Steve worked as art director at Paisley Park from the late 80s until around 2001 (and did things like the album art for Graffiti Bridge, all done by hand) and some years into it the two rented a new digital camera and did many off-the-cuff shoots around Paisley Park. It was the early days of digital cameras and Prince loved being able to control his own images and get immediate results for the first time. A lot of experimenting took place! Here's the back cover, with Prince dribbling a basketball (he'd dared Steve to catch it on film, he was so fast):

And some more images from the book!

Picturing Prince: An Intimate Portrait

by Steve Parke