Prince: The Two-Volume Special Edition

Steve Parke is an award-winning illustrator, designer, and photographer. He worked for Prince for 13 years as his in-house art director at Paisley Park – doing everything from designing album covers and hand painting guitars to enlisting every spare pair of hands to melt candles for an impromptu music video. He’s also worked with David Bowie, Bon Jovi, Bob Dylan, AC/DC, Marcus Miller, and the Grateful Dead, and has long collaborated with Sheila E., The Family/deluxe, Victor Wooten, and Stanley Clarke, among others, both as a photographer and a designer of numerous album covers and promotional materials and merchandise.

"""In the new two-volume book 'Prince: Collected Photographs,' published by ACC Art Books, Steve Parke throws open the doors to Prince's inner world.""""Aside from a handful of images that were selected as promo shots, most of these pictures have remained unseen until now. But in his new two-volume book Prince: Collected Photographs, Parke throws open his extensive archive to let the world into the inner workings of the legend’s visual process.""""There are photos of Prince at his Paisley Park home and with his first wife Mayte Garcia and dog Mia; others show him messing about at a children’s playground, or in different outfits that he’d cycle through in the same shoot, trying to find the vision that clicked.""""And while the hundreds of images shown in Prince: Collected Works speak to the hefty expectations at Paisley Park ('You were put through the ringer a little bit with the number of hours you were awake and the amount of stuff you were expected to produce,' Parke laughs), the photographer’s main takeaway, having spent the last years trawling his archives and remembering his storied time under Prince’s employment, is of how much the artist cared about putting the time in.""" - Wallpaper