From the publisher:

An award-winning documentary photographer delivers a stunning visual history of the Silicon Valley technology boom, in which he was witness to key moments in the careers of Steve Jobs and more than seventy other leading innovators as they created today’s digital world.

In the spring of 1985, a technological revolution was underway in Silicon Valley, and documentary photographer Doug Menuez was there in search of a story—something big. At the same time, Steve Jobs was being forced out of his beloved Apple and starting over with a new company, NeXT Computer. His goal was to build a supercomputer with the power to transform education. Menuez had found his story.

Menuez hoped to photograph Jobs as he built this new computer from conception to product launch, thereby capturing the spirit and substance of innovation through the world’s top technology guru. In an amazing act of trust, Jobs granted Menuez unprecedented access to him and his team, and what Menuez thought would last only three years soon stretched into fifteen. Once Silicon Valley heard Jobs had granted him complete access, they all did. Over the years, Menuez photographed behind the scenes with John Warnock at Adobe, John Sculley at Apple, Bill Gates at Microsoft, John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins, Bill Joy at Sun Microsystems, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove at Intel, Mark Andreessen at Netscape, and more than seventy other leading companies and innovators.

By 2000, an era was ending, the Valley had crashed, and Steve Jobs was rising up, riding a blazing rocket back to glory. The growth of transformational technology during this singular era had led to the creation of more jobs and wealth than any time in human history. And Menuez was there, witness to a global revolution.

In Fearless Genius, Menuez brings his experiences to print, showing, in 100 stunning photographs of scenes only he had access to, the human face of innovation and what it takes to transform the power of ideas into reality.

.

.

“My project was featured among 35 other exhibits as part of Circuit 2013, organized by Photographic Social Vision, an amazing NGO dedicated to social documentary,” explains Doug, who flew to Barcelona for the opening.

Though it’s been up just a day, “Fearless Genius” has already gotten lots of press in Spain. Here’s a small selection. Our personal favorite headline: “Los Nerds de Palo Alto.”

.

.

.

“Pieced together, all the pictures Menuez made now provide one of, if not the most, comprehensive records of the rise of the personal computer and influence of a place that changed the entire globe,” writes Jakob Schiller in “Unpublished Photos of Steve Jobs and Silicon Valley’s Early Days Finally Surface.”

Read the complete feature here.

.

A screenshot of the Wired.com feature on Doug Menuez’s “Fearless Genius.” Click to read.

.

.

.

Click on the screenshot to read “Embedded on the Front Lines of the Digital Revolution.”

.

.

.

Congratulations to Doug Menuez, who has been invited to exhibit photographs from his “Fearless Genius” body of work, which documents the rise of Silicon Valley from 1985 to 2000, at the venerable Visa pour l’Image international festival of photojournalism in Perpignan, France, this fall. Find out more about the festival, scheduled for September 1–16, at visapourlimage.com. And click below to watch Doug’s 2009 TED talk on his project…

.

.

.

.

.

Steve Jobs. Photo © Doug Menuez. From the exhibition “Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley 1995–2000,” which will go on view at the 9th Photographic Art Festival starting May 23.

.

Doug Menuez is really on a roll with his exhibition “Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley 1995–2000.” The show, which made its debut at the Moscow Photobiennale last month (read about it on here, on Doug’s blog), will be mounted in China on May 23rd as part of the 9th China Photographic Art Festival. The fest is organized by the Chinese Photographers Association and will take place in Wudang Mountain, which happens to be the birthplace of Tai Chi—something the 100-hour-workweek digital pioneers who Doug photographed all those years could have really used…

.

.

Doug also gave a presentation on “Fearless Genius,” his 15-year project chronicling the rise of Silicon Valley from 1985 to 2000, at Skolkovo, a school in an area of Moscow that has ambitions to be Russia’s Silicon Valley. And that too was a hit—some 600 people attended.

“Skolkovo is a new innovation center and business school. They are attempting to build a Stanford/MIT–type campus to build a Silicon Valley in Moscow,” Doug explains. “The lecture went very well. At the end, it was so amazing—I was asked to sign autographs for 20 minutes. Incredible! I think the points I’m making about the idealism in the early days of the digital revolution, the intense level of sacrifice required, and the brilliance of Steve Jobs’ approach to innovation resonate with Russians.”

As a side note, our fashion-conscious readers will be interested to know that Doug had a suit custom made for the event, courtesy of Freemans Sporting Club, the New York City men’s clothier whose dapper goods are all locally made. Scroll down to see a photo of Doug, plus pictures from the biennale, which also featured work by Alec Soth and Stephen Shore, among others.

.

Doug Menuez in his Freemans Sporting Club suit.

Doug Menuez in Russia for the opening of his exhibition "Fearless Genius" at the Moscow Biennale. Photo © Anton Galetsky.

.

.

.

.

.

“This show was a fantastic surprise and came at just the right moment,” says Doug, whose project began when Steve Jobs allowed Doug to shadow him for three years. “I have to thank Olga Sviblova, director of MAMM, for taking a chance on this material, and Jean-Jacques Naudet for his championing it on La Lettre de la Photographie, which brought it to Olga’s attention.”

On March 31, Doug will present a lecture on his project at the Skolkovo technology institute in the heart of Moscow’s Silicon Valley. “I want to foster a dialogue around what lessons can be learned from the era I documented,” he says. “How can we inspire the next generation of engineers and inventors? Who will be the next Steve Jobs?”

Read on for Doug’s account of how the exhibition came together, and its broader significance…

“I’ve been working for a few years to edit and scan the work, which has been insanely difficult because I shot so much stuff—250,000 negs were counted by the master picture editor Karen Mullarkey, who has been working on this since 2004, when Stanford University Libraries acquired the archive.

For the show, I worked out a cool hybrid approach to the work. Although I now really love digital photography, I shot this work mostly on tri-x film. I found some of my original prints from the ’80s, and they blew me away. So I began to work out how to take the scans we had started doing—we were working on that with National Geographic—and print them on silver gelatin paper. I retouch the scans in Photoshop and then output to digital negs, which we then print in the traditional ‘wet’ darkroom. So here you have an appropriate blend of old and new, with digital scans leading to analog traditional silver prints showing images of people inventing digital technology, including digital photography and software like Photoshop. Crazy.

I think now that Steve has died, and enough time has passed since I ended the project, people are now curious about the history of the technology that surrounds them. They can see that era as a distinct time in history. This esoteric work, despite the subject, is at core about human beings engaged in a passionate, obsessive struggle. I see it as a validation of the original idea to document the human side of high technology—the people who built the world we live in now, while they were building it. At the time, we had no idea how completely their work would change our lives, although I could see something was definitely happening.

.

Click to preview images from "Fearless Genius" at the Multimedia Art Museum's website.

.

When I started, it seemed obvious the dreamers of Silicon Valley were inventing powerful tools. But many assumed they would have a choice about using these tools. Today, if you want to be engaged in the larger culture, there is no choice.You have changed your behavior and learned to adapt, to some degree. You use a computer and probably a smart phone and take it all for granted. This is very interesting to me, and I hope people begin to look at how our culture and behavior are changing.

Our economy exploded during the digital revolution and whole countries worldwide scaled up with millions of jobs. For those in the developing world, this technology is crucial and still largely unobtainable and represents the opportunity to improve their lives in every way. I often heard engineers in the ’80s talking about how they wanted to bring computers to kids in Africa, to improve agriculture, education, and health care and make the world a better place. That idealism fueled the digital revolution but got corrupted by the staggering success of the Internet boom later on.

With the dotcom bubble came this crazy greed-fueled IPO craze. In many ways, that sort of thinking has stuck, and true innovation seems to be slowed down in the Valley. I mean, look at the millions of jobs created by the PC industry and the people I photographed in the ’80s and ’90s. Since I ended in 2000 I can’t think of a single innovation that has exploded into new jobs and factories in the U.S. and around the world the way computers did. I’m talking about millions of middle-class-paying regular jobs with benefits to support communities, not selling your crafts online through social networking. So what will be the next tech revolution? Will it be green tech, bio tech, or something else? Will it be social networking and 3D printers with everyone working at home?”

.

.

Steve Jobs in 1985. Photo by Doug Menuez, from "Fearless Genius."

.

Steve Jobs‘ resignation from Apple has led many to wonder about the future of his groundbreaking, culture-defining company. (The Wall Street Journal is polling its readers about the fate of Apple, in fact.) But I can’t help but feel distressed about what his stepping down says about his health.”I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come,” he wrote in his resignation letter. Ominous.

So as a sort of tribute to this great visionary, I’m posting links to “Fearless Genius,” Doug Menuez‘s photographs documenting the rise of Silicon Valley, shot over a 15-year period, starting in 1985. At the time, Doug notes, Jobs had been forced out of Apple—shocking to think about now—and was starting NeXT. He granted Doug unlimited access to photograph himself and his team for what started as an assignment for Life magazine (pitched by Doug) and turned into something much larger—a chronicle of a historic period of American innovation. (Doug talked about the project at a TEDx presentation he made last year, viewable in its entirety here.)

Doug shot more than 250,000 images during his 15 years in Silicon Valley. Many can be seen at Stanford University Libraries‘ website, in the Douglas Menuez Photography Collection. Below is a brief video interview with Doug about “Fearless Genius,” made in advance of a 2010 lecture he was giving on the project at Palo Alto Institute.

.

.

.

We finally got a video link to the “Fearless Genius” presentation Doug gave at TEDx in San Francisco this past November. “Fearless Genius,” of course, is the vast series of photographs (more than 250,000) he took in the 15 years he documented Silicon Valley in the ’80s and ’90s—a project that grew from a Life magazine story Doug shot on Steve Jobs.

..

..

At TEDx, Doug—who is in the process of putting together a “Fearless Genius” book and film—talks about being a successful photojournalist who traveled the world, and he takes the audience through some of his remarkable work from those days. Then he explains how he got from there…

..

A photo from Doug's book "Transcendent Spirit: The Orphans of Uganda."

..

To here…

..

Steve Jobs' fledgling NeXT factory. Photo by Doug Menuez.

..

Doug has a new project in the works—a big one—that will be debuting next month. More on that soon.

..

..