In his fifty-seven years, Prince mastered the art of control—not merely the show of self-possession but the daily practice of it. The gravitational pull of racial, sexual, spiritual systems did not appear to act on him. In 1981, the questions he posed in “Controversy”—was he black or white, gay or straight, religious or godlike?—were answered in his right to ask them in the first place, his right to be everything. He was a producer, writer, vocalist, bassist, water drummer, cymbalist, hand-clapper, finger-snapper, rustler of wind chimes. It was by something like magic that he was able to stamp “Slave” on his cheek, to change his mononym to a then-unprintable glyph (both acts in protest of Warner Brothers’ legal exertions), and still to broadcast, for the ages, a spectacle of freedom. Not even the presence of his orthopedic cane, in his last two decades, could persuade us that the congenital heel-wearer, who, onstage, had divided his small body into splits with such animal grace, was aging painfully. We knew only what Prince wanted us to know. In the year and a half since he collapsed in an elevator at Paisley Park, his Minnesota compound, his well-guarded myth has become vulnerable to the influence of others. A will has yet to be recovered; Warner Brothers and other entities threaten to organize the contents of his vault into albums; his estate follows through with distribution deals that run counter to his artistic wishes; and his Minnesota refuge has been opened to the public, like some latter-day Graceland.

All this means that one is predisposed to side-eye any production released since his death. But the photographer Afshin Shahidi’s new book, “Prince: A Private View,” conveys both doting reverence and, in its glossiness and sheer heft (more than two hundred and fifty photographs, about half of them previously unpublished), definitive authority. Its short foreword is written by Beyoncé, who learned from Prince the knack of both withholding and dramatizing the facts of one’s private life. (It was Prince, she writes, who made her “curious about the world behind the stage, the business of show.”) In amiable, earnest captions and anecdotes, Shahidi conveys the confidence that Prince had in his vision—or, more precisely, the way in which Prince sought to use the photographer as an instrument to produce a fantastical, private theatre of himself. This kind of private view does not involve an off-duty Prince, lounging in impossibly light silk pajamas, as one might imagine. Instead, whether after a show, on a plane, in a rehearsal, or in the early hours, Prince is always performing, always on. On the book’s cover, he appears to emerge out of some long, gray void, smiling slightly, his white hat dramatically tilted. It turns out that the backdrop was just the empty sound-equipment trailer from the Musicology tour. Prince had the power to do that, to make the ordinary aesthetically lush.

Shahidi casts himself as more the medium than the artist. “Prince’s voice was in my head,” he writes of selecting the images that would make up the collection. The photographer, who was born in Iran and immigrated to Minnesota when he was eight, began working with Prince’s camp in 1993, at twenty-three. In his introduction, he tells us of the moment when he first met the musician, at Paisley Park, where he was brought on to load film. (“He looked at me with a smirk and asked, ‘What’s your name?’ ”) Gradually, Shahidi picked up more consequential work. One day, Prince demanded that he see the crew member’s portfolio. Shahidi stayed up all night, cobbling together a package made mostly of portraits of his wife. Prince “thumbed through it quickly, made a few faces, handed it back, and walked away.” By 2002, the year of the One Nite Alone tour, Shahidi had officially become Prince’s personal photographer, shadowing him on tours and at Paisley Park; he was the only person allowed to document Prince’s legendary parties at 3121, his winter Los Angeles mansion.

“A Private View” follows a critical period in Prince’s style agenda. By the early two-thousands, Prince’s skin-bearing early dress had changed to a more intellectual kind of drag. He exaggerated male uniforms so that they seemed delicate: suits with flared pants, jewels as buttons, baroque jackets that flaunted his chest like décolletage. In one image—taken, we learn, on his way to a rehearsal for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, in New York City, in 2004—Prince ambulates like a supermodel, his hips jutting out of his tight, pale-yellow bottoms. Like Prince’s clothes, the photographs evoke a timeless and sexy parallel world of his own invention and inner desires. According to Shahidi, the call to shoot could come from a producer, or from Prince himself, at any time of day or night. Shahidi would then travel to wherever Prince was. One photo, taken at four in the morning at the Palace Hotel in New York City, in 2006, features Prince closeup, his kohl-lined eyes gazing at Shahidi’s lens, his face sharply manicured, transmitting miraculously little emotional information. Looking at it, one is reminded of the strange gifts of the frequently photographed, their ability to exact control of every muscle. This is how Prince wanted to look, just before sunrise.

Shahidi, who is also a cinematographer, and Prince, whose eighties film trilogy can be understood as an extravagant, fictive autobiography, shared a playful cinephilia. Many of Shahidi’s wider shots look like movie stills; in one, taken in 2009, Prince stands in a cavernous hall in Paisley Park, his tunic matching the earthen color of the walls. A gorgeous guitar leans against him, half his height. In another, Prince, sitting in a limousine, answers a call, his eyes turned upward, his red-suited wrist flopping expectantly. Without Shahidi’s captions informing us that the call was invented, one would assume that the photo was an elegant candid.

Speculating about the nature of this subtle role-play is part of the book’s fun. If Shahidi asked Prince to lounge on a gray couch, pretending that he was waiting for a call from a lover, he would plunge in the role, caress the phone, and stare out the window. Just as easily, Prince might play the clown, sucking in his cheeks while he fondled a glittering sculpture of a fish. When Shahidi asked Prince to cover his mouth with his leopard-print bandana because “it made him look like a gangster of love”—Prince would laugh, secure the cloth, and then give it to him. Once, Shahidi caught Prince walking around Maui after a show. Shahidi took a picture of him in profile as he looked at items in a store. “He seemed intrigued by the fact that he could have control over these voyeuristic shots of him,” Shahidi writes. When Prince asked Shahidi to take his passport photos, Shahidi had to explain patiently that the format came with certain requirements. (The outtakes Shahidi printed show Prince doing his look.)

Our personal Instagrams are reminders that, left to our own devices, we tend to record our lives with an eye to fantasy, rather than straight documentary. Prince was better at presenting his ideal image than most. Tellingly, the portraits over which Prince exerted the least control—those in which he is busy performing—are the least compelling and mysterious of the book. In an image taken in Marrakesh in 2005, Shahidi, for a while the only photographer allowed onstage with Prince, catches the musician as he extracts some heavenly note from his guitar, his entire body bent in ecstasy. (The same formation appears in at least twenty images from photo shoots.) During the Musicology tour, Shahidi used remote cameras to “try to catch Prince flying.” The shots show Prince sweating, his lips slackened by his body’s velocity, his eyes soulfully closed. Until the end, Prince could lose himself in his work. But those moments when he was acting also contain their truths.