ON the books pages of this weekend's Sunday Herald Life magazine, the estimable Brian Morton considers a new biography of the musician Prince by Ben Greenman, the writer who collaborated with Brian Wilson on the Beach Boys' songwriter's thought-provoking autobiography, published last year. I have not yet read the Prince book, but its superb title, Dig If You Will The Picture, more or less ensures that I shall. Even a passing knowledge of the Prince canon should identify the phrase, sans punctuation, as the opening line of one of his finest recordings, When Doves Cry. Although I Am Brian Wilson made fine bald sense for the cover of the book Greenman ghost-wrote, the Beach Boys' back catalogue is full of songs that would have served the same purpose as the Prince lyric, although I Just Wasn't Made For These Times had already been used by Don Was for his profile of Wilson, and the line "I'm getting bugged driving up and down this same old strip" was actually penned by Mike Love. Even more perfect is the first line of Julian Cope's first hit with Teardrop Explodes, Reward. If no-one is currently working on the definitive tome about one of my generation's greatest pop mavericks under the title Bless My Cotton Socks I'm In The News, it is surely a tragically missed opportunity.

That may be exactly how photographer Steve Parke regards Ben Greenman's title as well, and he may well be kicking himself for not having thought of it for his own book. It was, of course, a year ago last Friday that the Purple Reign of Prince Rogers Nelson came to a tragically early end. Hence the sudden publishing boom celebrating my generation's greatest funk maverick. Parke's book is rather more prosaically entitled Picturing Prince (Cassell, £20), but that is precisely what Parke's job was. Between 1988 and 2001 he designed artwork and took photographs for the artist, working as art-director from Prince's Paisley Park headquarters in Minnesota for much of that time. The quarto-sized hardback he has produced is full of portraits of the musicians from that period, a large number of them previously unseen but, Parke insists, approved by their subject at the time.

We only have his word for that of course, but the pictures are absolutely stunning, and only a few of them really look like "rock star" pictures, posed with one of his custom made "symbol"-shaped guitars. Here he is in a kaftan in the grounds of Paisley Park, in wild parkland across the road or the manicured gardens of Chanhassen Arboretum. Here he is shooting hoops at the Paisley Park basketball court or in the playpark he had built at his home studio complex before the death, at just a week old, of his son Gregory. Here he is with his purple 1999 Plymouth Prowler set of flash wheels, and in several different Messianic poses, even having his hair done and more informally at his villa in Marbella with first wife Mayte. In not one of the pictures is he less than immaculately turned out, nor does he appear unaware of the lens.

Parke supplies a gloss to the photographs which can be as frustrating as it is revealing. He has dredged his memory bank for context for the photographs, and some of the vignettes are well worth the reading. He is careful never to tarnish his old boss's reputation, and is clearly both grateful for the opportunity he was given at Paisley Park and utterly in awe of the man as a musician. Understandably. But there are very few dates attached to any of the photographer's reminiscences, although the context of the music being honed at the time often gives a pretty good approximation. Tantalisingly, some of the music he recalls in quite precise detail – and Parke is quite evidently a man who knows and loves his music – has never seen the light of day. Parke also carefully gives himself credit for having inspired a few of the sonic as well as the visual wonders that Prince left us with, and that may be true, but it does sometimes chafe against the grain of a book that is mostly sincerely reverential, even when explicit that 13 years at the service of such a demanding boss was as draining as it was rewarding.

It could simply be that the man who pictured Prince did not feel entitled to re-purpose a line from When Doves Cry because it pre-dated his era. And he, like the rest of the world, will be sure to devour any pages we ever see of the memoir that Prince announced he was working on just a month before he died: My Name Is Prince, surely?