Stockland Martel

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Doug Menuez wanted to redesign his website so that busy art buyers could use it with ease. But with thousands of images and three decades of work in fine art, photojournalism, and advertising, he first had to ask himself a very important question: “How the f*ck do I represent what I do?”

Or, more precisely, “How do I explain and present a long, varied career that has various twists and turns? I’ve had almost 30 years of making a living as a photographer,” explains Doug. “I’ve got this body of work that includes the Silicon Valley material [“Fearless Genius”], a collection of case studies of the companies that changed the world. Then you have my years of shooting as a photojournalist. Plus shooting celebrities for Time and People. Sports for USA Today. Super Bowls and Olympics. I went to the North Pole. I crossed the Sahara for Newsweek. I went up the Amazon and photographed the leper colony. Then I got into advertising.”

It took six months and a whole lot of careful decision-making, but http://menuez.com is officially live. The site, which he created through liveBooks, opens with a simple slide-show-like Flash animation of his new work: his worldwide campaign for Emirates Airlines shot in Dubai, his book Transcendent Spirit, his pro-bono campaign for Uncommon Schools. Which is a smart choice—art buyers want to see the new stuff first. “Technically I wanted it to be easier to navigate, so it’s more about the pictures. I think the idea of my previous site was good—and it made it into American Photo’s Top 10 photo websites. But I got a lot of complaints on it too. A lot of people were frustrated—they thought it was too esoteric. These guys at liveBooks are the masters of easy and quick and good interfaces. When I found out they were doing custom websites, we did my custom site. If you’re a busy art buyer, you can get in and out of Menuez.com pretty quickly. If you’re drinking a glass of wine and you have five more minutes than that, you can explore and discover.”

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From "Selected Works" at Menuez.com.

For art buyers who do have the time to see more—with or without a glass of wine— there’s a brief list of menu options, such as Books, Edition Prints, and Commissions, at the left side of the homepage. In Selected Works, you can delve into projects like “Heaven, Earth, Tequila,” a four-year undertaking in which Doug photographed at one of Mexico’s oldest tequila distilleries, a place where the methods date back to pre-Colombian times—including the use of naked tequileros. As Doug explains in his introduction to the project, “Heaven, Earth, Tequila” was inspired by a passage in Salman Rushdie’s book The Ground Beneath Her Feet: “I was struck by a scene where the protagonist sees naked men in vats of agave juice making tequila,” Doug writes. “I thought the image too precise and unusual to be completely fictional, and that the author must have observed this himself.”

Doug has also posted a host of images from his recent travels through Vietnam, a documentary journey he made at the request of Nikon, which had equipped him with its new D700 camera. Closer to home, he offers his view of New York’s five boroughs in “Infinite City,” which derived from a commission by the New York City Economic Development Corporation in 2006. “The asked me to shoot whatever I saw fit, to roam the streets capturing the flavor of daily life and also a few landmarks,” Doug writes in his introduction to the portfolio. “Aside from the daunting, impossible task this presented, it was of course a dream assignment. I had just moved back after almost 25 years away and was learning New York all over again. I was seeing the town with fresh eyes.” That series has since evolved into an HD digital-video project that Doug is nearly finished shooting.

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From "Infinite City," in "Selected Works" at Menuez.com.

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Dubai, from "Advertising 1" in the "Commissions" link at Menuez.com.

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Frame grab of the "Editorial" section in "Commissions" at Menuez.com.

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Steve Jobs, from Doug Menuez's photo essay "Fearless Genius," in "Selected Works" at Menuez.com.

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Menuez.com also features one of Doug’s most ambitious projects: “Fearless Genius,” his photographs documenting the rise of Silicon Valley. “I was there in the room while Steve [Jobs] was negotiating with Ross Perot,” he says. “I photographed everyone from Bill Gates to [Intel co-founder] Gordon Moore to David Packard.” Doug devoted 15 years to the project, and yet his work has only begun. He has some 250,000 images that he needs to edit for a fine-art coffee-table book that he has planned. (The Stanford University Libraries house a selection of the “Fearless Genius” images, which Doug links to through his website.) There will be an exhibition, he wants to do a documentary film, and he has a team in place to develop a nonprofit science-and-math-related educational organization for kids.

“I’d like to think that at the core of this archive is my eye and my vision, which is really concerned with the human condition,” Doug says of Menuez.com. “Little everyday stuff. What I do isn’t big things—it’s little moments of interaction. What does it feel like to be alive? Why are we here? Why am I here? It’s all interesting to me.”

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