We spoke to Steven Nunez, better known as @stevensjpeg, and he shared the story behind two of his favorite photos taken in Chicago.
Young Thug Oct 25, 2019.
Canon EOS 6D - EF24-105mm f/4L at 50mm -1/400 - F4 - ISO 6400.
“This was for Pep Rally Takeover founded by Q Breeze and Hot Rod. What we do is we go to high schools and throw a party. This time we were at the University of Chicago Charter School and Young Thug was in Chicago for tour.
This event happened during the school day so he came in as a special guest. The kids didn’t know who the special guest was so when he came on they were like ‘now way that’s him.’ It was such a crazy day.
After he performed he literally took the time to take a picture with every single kid. He really showed love to Chicago. Meeting Young Thug for the first time he was such a nice genuine guy.
What happened was they all wanted a group picture and there were like four other photographers there who weren’t part of the organization. They all wanted to get his attention for pictures and basically, it was hard to get his attention.
You see in the photo he’s looking up? Since we were in the gymnasium we had a stand where the volleyball referees stand on. I was up there at first and Hot Rod was on the microphone like, ‘hey everybody look at Steven up there.’ I was about to take the photo but this dude came up to me and started yelling like crazy to get down.
Basically he kicked me down. When Young Thug posed for the picture he was looking up at that dude. It still came out to be a good photo. Then later that day he had a show at Credit Union 1 Arena. I was there as well to take photos.
When I got there I got a couple of notifications that he posted my photo. I opened it and it wasn’t loading because you know how it is when you go to concerts, there’s no connection. He posted my photo and I was just surprised. The photo is definitely special.”
Tyler the Creator Sept 4, 2019.
Canon EOS 6D - 70-200mm at 70mm - 1/500 - F2.8 - ISO 6400.
“I had just started my semester, it was the first week of school of my sophomore year. I got reached out to cover the show for my publication The Columbia Chronicle. I showed up and it was for Tyler’s ‘Igor’ tour.
What makes this photo special is the back story of it. People don’t know what it looks like shooting this concert because if you look at the photo it looks like he’s posing, holding still. That is because I take it at 1/500 basically it looks like get standing still.
The whole time he was dancing and going crazy. He screams, he dances and goes crazy so that was very insane. The thing is there were flashing lights and stuff like that. So when I was clicking through Lightroom going through every single photo there was a light photo, a dark photo, a light photo, so this was like a diamond in the rough.
I looked at this one and was like damn this is the one right here. That orange flash on the right of the picture that was all-natural nothing was edited in post-production. It fell right on his hand everything about that photo was perfect. I don’t edit my photos crazy I don’t do anything or put anything that’s not in there.
How the internet reacted to it I really thought Tyler was going to repost it but he didn’t but it's cool. This photo is special in general I feel like it’s a special moment in Tyler's career. He went from like ‘Yonkers’ and ‘Odd Future’ to ‘Igor.’ The tour's production, in general, was crazy.”
Steven Nunez is a 20-year-old from Chicago who is currently a student at Columbia College Chicago and serves as a photojournalist for the school’s newspaper, The Chronicle. Within a year, he’s created a great body of work consisting of mainly music photography.