Prince is photographed on the sound stage at Paisley Park, his estate in Chanhassen, Minnesota, in the summer of 1997.

These intimate photos show a different side of Prince

Photographs by Steve Parke
Story by Lisa Respers France, CNN
Published April 19, 2026

Prince is photographed on the sound stage at Paisley Park, his estate in Chanhassen, Minnesota, in the summer of 1997.

Nearly 10 years after his death, Prince remains one of the world’s most enigmatic musicians.

A musical genius who could play dozens of instruments and revolutionized stage performance, he remained intensely private until the end of his life.

But those close to him knew someone different.

“We really just flew by the seat of our pants,” said Steve Parke, a photographer who was his Prince’s art director for 13 years. Parke said Prince would often tell him: “Grab your camera. We're gonna go do something.”

Prince poses for an early morning portrait in September 1999.

Prince’s guitar rests in a bed of purple flowers outside of his studio.

He recalled a day in October 1999, when Prince asked him to accompany him to an arboretum near his Paisley Park estate in Chanhassen, Minnesota.

“We just wandered up around a bit,” Parke said. “But it was like a full day of hanging out with him. Nobody tugging his sleeve to come to the studio. Nobody — meaning his own brain — being like, ‘I need to go record.’”

Parke snapped photos as they wandered around the grounds. “It was very relaxed, very chill,” he said.

Prince is photographed at a local arboretum in October 1999. “I never mentioned it to him, but I loved how his silhouette echoed one I remembered from ‘Purple Rain’ when I was a teenager,” photographer Steve Parke says in his new book “Prince: Black, White, Color.”

More often, Parke would photograph Prince during breaks while he was making music or rehearsing for a tour. A collection of his exclusive photos, many of which have never been published before, are in a new book, “Prince: Black, White, Color.”

Prince’s death, from an accidental fentanyl overdose on April 21, 2016, at the age of 57, shook the world, and those who loved him.

“It hit me on so many levels,” Parke said. “When you've had someone not only be a personal friend, but a person you work for. There's a cultural thing that goes with it, too.”

“We pulled Prince’s Plymouth purple Prowler onto the sound stage and shot a series of photos around it,” Parke recalled from this shoot in August 1999. “One of my favorites shows him looking at me through the mirror. In the original color version, his reflected right eye was almost completely lost. During my black-and-white conversion, I was thrilled to discover that the eye emerged from the shadows.”

“This was part of a series shot on the sound stage with Prince constantly in motion,” Parke said of this fall 1999 photo. “Considering the limitations of my early digital camera, I was very happy to capture him mid-action.”

“Prince had started wearing his hair braided this way a few weeks before this (April 1999) shoot and seemed to really enjoy the look,” Parke said. “He had also just had this striped suit made, so we photographed it extensively.”

Parke recalled meeting Prince as something like serendipity.

It was the 1980s and he was backstage taking photos at a Lionel Richie concert when he met Levi Seacer, Jr., a member of Sheila E.’s band, longtime collaborators of Prince’s.

“We chatted a bit and he said, ‘Oh, you're a photographer.’ I said, ‘Well, yeah, but I'm really an artist.’ Seacer asked him to draw something, he made a little sketch on a napkin.

This 1996 portrait of Prince, shot with a wide-angle lens, is one of the earliest photos that Parke took of him. “After Prince selected this image as one he liked, I added a henna-like tattoo to his hand in Photoshop, which he loved,” Parke said.

They kept in touch and, when Seacer told him he would be joining Prince’s band, he said he wanted Parke to come along.

“I'm like, in my head at the time: ‘What do you mean you're going to take me with you? I'm not a musician,’” Parke said. “But I didn't ask.”

It turned out that Prince wanted Parke to do set design for the 1988 single “Glam Slam” from the “Lovesexy” album.

Parke, a theater major in college, decided to go for it.

Prince on his patio in Marbella, Spain. “One thing that always stands out to me is how often he was barefoot in my photos,” Parke says in his book. “Growing up in the 1980s seeing his carefully crafted public image everywhere, that felt surprisingly rare.”

Because Prince was so busy, Parke said he only had three hours — and few resources — to come up with something.

He drew up a sketch and showed it to Prince — who then promptly disappeared for three days. When the star returned, he had no compliments for Parke, but also no complaints.

“I was kind of freaking out,” he said. Convinced he had blown the job, he reached out to Seacer, who assured him that no news was good news and to keep doing the work.

In September 2000, Prince was filming the video for “When Eye Lay My Hands on U” and allowed Parke to take photos. “A dancer stood behind him with her arms wrapped around him, yet she remained completely unseen, which I thought was incredibly striking,” Parke said.

Parke went on to become Prince’s art director for the next 13 years, designing stage sets and album covers and even hand-painting guitars and concert t-shirts.

“He was really great about seeing potential in people and giving them opportunities, which is amazing when you think of the level he operated at,” Parke said.

Parks recalled Prince asking him if he was familiar with the then-new technology that was digital cameras and if he ever did any photography.

“We were having dinner at a restaurant in Marbella, and Prince asked me to bring my camera,” Parke said of this June 1999 shot. “I did not have the heart to tell him that without a flash, shooting after dark would be difficult. As we left the restaurant, paparazzi flashes lit everything up. After they departed, we used the headlights of a friend’s car and had them sit in front of the beams.”

Prince at his home in Marbella, Spain, in June 1999. “Prince thought it would be fun to shoot photos in the pool,” photographer Steve Parke recalls in his new book. Parke stayed outside the water. “I was certain that if I got in, he would mischievously splash me. I did not want to risk the camera, so I leaned over the pool instead, which was probably the more dangerous choice in the long run."

When Parke said he shot photos before but had never used a digital camera, Prince’s response was simple: “OK, let’s get a camera.”

That set off a special, creative collaboration. Prince appears easy and comfortable in the many shots Parke took of the extremely private star.

Parke shot Prince around the world, including at a home he kept in Marbella, Spain, and at the studio in Paisley Park.

Prince looks in the mirror above his bed in Marbella, Spain. With him are his then-wife, Mayte, and their dog Mia.

“It was always fun,” Parke said, “but it was also always a little like, ‘Oh I hope that (the photos) come out.’”

Back then, there was no way to view the digital images until they were downloaded — “which, in my case, was with him sitting behind me, so you just prayed that everything came out OK,” Parke said.

“But I think having shot film, I had a pretty good sense of how to expose things properly,” he said.

Prince at the arboretum in Minnesota. “Given how much Prince’s eyes were part of his identity, I loved that he chose to close them in several images that day,” Parke says in his book. “Backlit by the sun, I was unsure whether anything would register on the camera at all, but instead a beautiful sunburst crossed his face.”

The last time Parke saw Prince was in May 2015 when Parke was living in Baltimore and Prince traveled to the city to participate in a rally for peace after the death of Freddie Grey in police custody.

Now, almost a decade after Prince’s death, Parke is hoping these photographs help the world see Prince the way he did.

“I hope people see him in kind of a different light,” Parke said. “There’s some of the rock ‘n’ roll star attitude in there, but there's a lot more of him as a person.”

This photo from the Paisley Park sound stage was from Parke’s first shoot with him in 1996.

Steve Parke’s book “Prince: Black, White Color” was published by Simon & Schuster and is available now. A two-volume special edition will be published on April 28.