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WILKES-BARRE — Doug Menuez went from photographing a heart-wrenching, brutal famine in Ethiopia to a different kind of fight in 1985.
Menuez was invited into the inner circle of Apple by Steve Jobs to document endless hours of work on landmark computing projects until 2000.
With over 250,000 negatives shot during the course of the 15-year project, Menuez captured the intimate details of the lives of engineers, programmers, and technology goliaths like Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
He followed them through unbelievable triumph and the darkest failures of Silicon Valley. The final result was his “Fearless Genius” project.
“I didn’t know this project was going to be this massive. I thought it was just going to be Steve Jobs,” Menuez explained Wednesday during a talk at the Wilkes-Barre Think Center. “The inspiration is really that Steve Jobs, who changed the world, was going to focus on education and build a computer that could create powerful tools for students … . That’s not necessarily super sexy for photography, but it was really important to me as a subject. All of my projects have an educational component.”
The talk was presented by the Social Fabric Collective, a non-profit that provides equipment and education to high school students interested in photography.
The award-winning Menuez has shot assignments for The Washington Post, Time and Newsweek plus ad campaigns for some of the world’s biggest companies.
He told Wednesday’s crowd that photographing computers or even people at a conference table and still being able to convey emotion and aesthetics has its challenges — even for him during his iconic project.
“I think the key is that I didn’t think about it as the technology, it was about humans. So I had spent my career up to that point trying to understand human behavior, trying to tell the story of the human condition and what we all share and try to figure out emotion. So I think if you bring that toolkit, you can go into any environment, any group, any tribe of humans,” said Menuez.
“It’s about anger, joy, frustration, and sacrifice,” he continued. “What’s common between all the success stories of Silicon Valley is that they all crashed and failed and got back up.”
“Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley 1985-2000” can be found in its entirety at fearlessgenius.org. The book is also available on the website.