USHER: MONSTAR
This body of work was created during a period of focused collaboration, observation, and trust. The images are drawn from moments of preparation, isolation, and authorship and the spaces where performance has not yet begun, but intention is already fully formed.
MONSTAR takes its name from the opening track of Usher’s highly celebrated album Raymond v. Raymond. During this period, Usher often spoke about feeling like a monster. He was carrying the weight of public perception, personal reckoning, and reinvention.
Producer Terry Lewis challenged that idea, reminding him that nothing he had done was born of malice. “You’re not a monster,” he said. “Let’s call you Monstar.” In the narrative of the song, the Monstar becomes something pursued rather than feared.
This work reflects that shift.
Produced as a limited photographic book in three copies, one held by Usher, one by the photographer (Walid Azami), and one retained privately.
MONSTAR was never intended to be exhaustive or explanatory. It is concerned less with chronology than with interior states: control, restraint, anticipation, and decision-making.
These photographs move between abstraction and clarity, between solitude and construction. They document a superstar not in performance, but in return. He is celebrating life, inhabiting moments of stillness, and reclaiming authorship on his own terms.
What remains is not a record of events, but a study of presence: how identity is reassembled quietly, before it is released back into the world.