{blackbabes} 'Tribute to an Icon' captures radiant Whitney Houston

In Randee St. Nicholas' photos of Whitney Houston on the set of the 1993 I'm Every Woman video, the singer appears composed and stunningly pretty, a triumph over the shooting conditions.

"She was 8½ months pregnant and we were on the Lower East Side in New York during a brutal winter," says St. Nicholas, who also directed the video. "We shot inside a building with no heat or electricity. It was 10 degrees below zero. And Whitney was radiant."

Radiant could describe most of the images in Whitney: Tribute to an Icon (Atria, $40), out today. The coffee-table tome contains 130 photos curated by St. Nicholas, whose work joins 21 acclaimed photographers, including David LaChapelle, Steven Meisel, Norman Seeff, Kevin Mazur, Neal Preston and Ebet Roberts.

Impressed by St. Nicholas' 21 Nights, 2008's lavish Prince photo book, Houston's family requested that she plumb her archives for a similar treatment of the R&B diva, who died in February. (Coincidentally, the first video St. Nicholas directed was Prince's Gett Off; the second was Houston's Woman.)

"I said I didn't want to use only my photographs, especially since this was going to be the official family tribute book," St. Nicholas says. "I thought it should be broader than my relationship with her. I wanted it to span 30 years of her career."

She faced challenges tracking down certain original negatives and completing the project within six weeks so Tribute would be on shelves by the holidays. And she was overwhelmed by the task of paring the cache.

"Every single photographer had incredible pictures of Whitney," she says. "We had thousands of amazing photos. I didn't find one picture where I said, 'Oh, she looks terrible.' She didn't have a bad side. She had gorgeous cheekbones and a captivating smile. She was a beautiful girl inside and out."

Houston, however, wasn't always an ideal subject.

"It wasn't that she didn't like being photographed," St. Nicholas says. "She didn't like to hold still. She was very gracious, but she liked to sing and dance and she was always laughing and talking. And at her height, she was a very busy girl. There was a lot going on."

St. Nicholas says she hopes the book will remind fans of Houston's enormous talent, beauty and effervescent personality and lessen the focus on sordid headlines that plagued her later years.

"There wasn't always light in her life, but she was light," St. Nicholas says. "She was full of life, very focused and loyal to a fault. She rose above all the press about the trouble in her life and gave so much to her fans. It's no accident that she mesmerized an entire world."