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.

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“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.”

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“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.

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

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

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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.

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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…

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“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.

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

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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?”

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Steve Jobs. Photo by Doug Menuez.

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For his obituary of the great Steve Jobs yesterday, David Walker of PDN talked with photographers who had worked with the Apple iconoclast. It seems that Jobs “had a reputation among photographers for being a difficult subject,” writes Walker. “And not just run-of-the mill difficult, but the archetype of difficult.”

One of the photographers Walker spoke with is Doug Menuez. Excerpt:

Doug Menuez spent more time photographing Jobs than just about any other photographer, after Jobs agreed to let him document the development of the NeXT computer. Menuez had access to the labs and boardroom for three years.

“In all those years, Steve only screamed at me at the top of his lungs once,” Menuez recalls. It was in 1988, when Fortune hired Menuez to shoot a portrait of Jobs for the cover of the magazine. Menuez wanted to photograph him in the NeXT offices, on a staircase that Jobs had commissioned architect I.M Pei to design. Jobs arrived for the shoot, looked at what Menuez had in mind, “then [he] leaned in and says, ‘This is the stupidest fucking idea that I’ve ever seen.’ Right in my face, like  5 or 6 inches away,” Menuez says. “I felt like I was 10 years old. He went off on a tirade. He said, ‘You just want to sell magazines. ‘And I said, ‘And you want to sell computers.’ And at that he said, ‘OK,’ and sat down.

Menuez concludes, “ I’ve been in war zones, but I like to say that I became a man learning how to stand my ground with Steve.”

To read the rest of “Steve Jobs: Visionary, Inventor, and Very Challenging Photo Subject,” go here.

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

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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.

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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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