DJ Shub is a Mohawk DJ who has pioneered the growing genre of electronic music “PowWowStep”. As a solo artist, DJ Shub released his first EP “PowWowStep” in 2016 and has since played some of the biggest music festivals in North America. His song “Indomitable” was notably handpicked by Sacha Baron Cohen as the theme music to his hit Showtime series, “Who Is America?”.
For this project, I was tasked with photographing DJ Shub for the release of his album “War Club”. I shot Shub in his home town of Fort Erie using environmental backdrops from his childhood. The idea was to position Shub and his land as interconnected entities that gave power to each other. As an Indigenous artist, the concept of land is a recurring theme in Shub’s music and we wanted to capture Shub back to his roots. It was really about shooting nothing but Shub and his land.
The Photographs were used in marketing and press materials and have since been featured on billboards at Yonge and Dundas Square in Toronto, Complex Media and Chronicle Journal. The album has topped Earshot, the national charts for campus/community radio stations across Canada.
