Doug Menuez is a remarkable photographer who has traveled to the North Pole, the Amazon, Vietnam, Africa, Dubai, Japan, to record the human condition, covering everything from the orphans of Uganda to, most notably, the rise of Silicon Valley in the ongoing Fearless Genius project.
Doug: Hey, great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Jeffery: One thing that really interests me about your work is, you know what’s interesting is that I’m living in San Francisco and you’re living in the town where I grew up [inaudible 00:00:39] New York. And what’s interesting is you lived here in the early 80s and began covering the technology scene in the early days before anyone knew about what was going to happen with the technology revolution. Tell us about some of the people you photographed and what you saw and what you experienced in those early days.
Doug: So I went out to San Francisco to go to the Art Institute to study art and be an artist – fell in with a group of photojournalist and shifted my studies to photojournalism and began working for newspapers and the Times and Newsweek and began covering assignments in the US and around the world. And I was documenting a lot of social issues: the aids crises, the [inaudible 00:01:22] crises, but coming back from the Ethiopia, began looking for something that was a little bit more positive for the human race and that’s when Steve Jobs announced he was going to build the super computer for education. He had been fired from Apple and he was starting over.
That’s what really attracted me to Silicon Valley. I wasn’t into technology per se, although, I had bought a Mac. I bought one of the first Mac so that was interesting — seems to be a creative tool, but what attracted me to Silicon Valley was once I got down there you could see this hidden power and it essentially was a misunderstood in kind of a hidden tribe with this astonishing power. You could see they were going to change every aspect of human life even then in the early 80s. If you just showed up and went and talked to them you would see that it was going to happen.
Jeffery: When was that Doug? What year was that?
Doug: I really began seriously covering the valley with Steve Jobs for Life Magazine in the end of 85 into 1986, but I have been going down there. I’d gone down there on a few assignments as early as 1982. He founded Apple Computer in 1982. It wasn’t about tech; it was this group of humans on a quest to invent the impossible that just really got me interested.
Jeffery: And what is that? I mean, they are probably people today on quest to solve the impossible. How do you find that and what do you look for? Tell us about that, because I’m sure there are people out there who are craving finding some –discovering a tribe like this somewhere?
Doug: Well, what I’m looking for is this intangible you can’t put it in a business plan. You know, we have this big startup culture — in the 80s it was very idealistic and naive almost, they knew they would make money but that was secondary. That led to huge breakthroughs because, money, as it turns out isn’t enough to walk through this, like, blazing fire of innovation; it’s just too fucking hard, excuse me, it’s really hard.
So what’s happened in the last 10 or 15 years since the crashes is innovation is iterated. We’re building on stuff that’s foundational from the 80s and 90s creating a really cool stuff and that is innovation, but it’s more iteration of previous stuff. And to go to the next revolution, to go to the next level and really create some amazing new stuff you have to have, I believe, that spirit, that original spirit that was about inventing tools to improve human life. They weren’t purely altruistic, but they were very idealistic; and yeah, they want to do cool stuff, but what attracts me is that sort of sense of purpose where they created meaning in their lives because they were so passionate about what they were doing that they would sacrifice anything to do it. That attracts me because it gives hope for the human race when you see that. That’s been quite a crush. That fear has been crushed, so I see little green trees of hope coming back with this next generation of entrepreneurs. They are looking for — some of them are very idealistic and want to… you know, have you heard of FB corpse and there is more…
Jeffery: Oh yeah, I know people who run B corpse and work, you know, I’ve met folks that are part of that organization. They commit themselves to social justices and social improvement and fairness and those kinds of things. Before we started recording you talked about purpose and it’s something that I have noticed. I spoke to a psychologist in New York, Dr. Donald Rockwell who help celebrities who are feeling alienated by their success and one thing she said that help folks who become successful is that they find a purpose or a higher calling to focus on to help them to give meaning to their work and we talked about you doing that before we started recording. It was some of your projects.
Doug: For me, I started as this kid just documenting in the streets of New York, but later on I realized that was just about me trying to figure out who I was by photographing the other are strangers and then sort of seeing where I fit in the equation. I think that’s why people still look at still photographs to understand the back of their minds they’re saying, “Who am I? Why am I here?” because we frame that subconscious and photographs seem to be a great intercept for us to understand the world around us and who we are and where we fit in.
