This is bin 1 of many, filled to the brim with photographs from tribe magazine. I shot these slides and negatives  during the birth of electronic music in Canada between 1993-2003.

I’ve waited many years for the technology to properly capture these images digitally – to do them justice. With the advent of new technology from our friends at Nikon, this is now possible. 

We’re putting these photographs from tribe into a special gallery area of our sister site, tribe.ca. Once this exhibit is over,  we will make this exhibit area available for content from other Canadian artists and  photographers.

It was a time before phone cameras, before digital photography. Most event promoters didn’t even allow attendees to bring cameras into the events, which is why photographs from this period in Canadian history are exceedingly rare. But Tribe, as the magazine of record for the electronic music and DJ community in Canada, was given unrestricted access to every event.

The scene wasn’t covered in any real way by the mainstream or alternative media of the day. They had no awareness of this culture for well over a decade, until it was nearly over.

But what a fantastic period in Canadian history!

The conditions were often harsh. Extreme hot or cold temperatures, abandoned toxic industrial Toronto warehouses, hallways filled with muscled sweaty shirtless ‘roid guys covered in Vicks, bloodthirsty mosquito-filled swamps, terrarium-like humidity,  disco nappers inside bass bins, dripping ceilings, deep mud, fire trap walk-ups rammed beyond capacity with floor joists creaking and swaying at 128 BPM. Love by the cases, happy smiling faces.

I took my cameras in and captured everything I could.

There are a lot of photographs from tribe. We have thousands of images. I will slowly release them here, one at a time. Please tell your friends about this page. Bookmark it. If you share these images on social media, please do not remove our watermarking, and please direct people back to this URL in your shares.

The URL to share is https://tribe.ca/legacy.

I’ve not seen these images since I shot them. To be honest, for years I was worried I hadn’t captured the culture on film in an adequate way.  I figured the photographs might not be good enough.

But now I see I did my most true and honest work as a photographer, at the exact instant my subjects and readers were experiencing the most true and honest part of their lives. I’m re-discovering the humanity, the cultural beauty, and the lasting impact of this period on Canadian history. As I hope you will, too.

We were young once, weren’t we? And wasn’t the music fucking amazing?!!

With love,

alexd (Alex Dordevic)
CEO | Editor| Publisher | Photographer | Raver
Tribe Magazine