Taking a Menuez Moment

Marty Beaudet

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Doug Menuez is a photographer with such a wide sphere of experience that it’s hard to imagine anyone who has not seen at least a portion of his work. After launching his career as an intern at the “Washington Post” in 1981, he went on to shoot a variety of topics for “Time,” “Newsweek,” “Life,” and other magazines, covering diverse topics such as the AIDS crises, the famine in Ethiopia, presidential campaigns, and numerous Superbowls. And showing no fear of earnings, Menuez has shot ad and fashion campaigns for household names such as DuPont, Reebok, Microsoft, and MetLife. Other credits include brochures and annual reports for the likes of GM, MasterCard, IBM, and Ralph Lauren.

Menuez has also shown a penchant for hi tech: Beginning in 1987, he documented the development of new technology for ten years, partly through extensive coverage of Steve Jobs et al at NeXT, John Warnock at Adobe Systems, and Bill Joy at Sun Microsystems.

Marty Beaudet sat down with Doug Menuez, who lives in Mill Valley, California with his wife and son, to gain some insight into his wide-ranging career.

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creativepro.com: Your work runs the gamut from major news stories to documentary books to ad campaigns for big-name clients; it seems you do a little bit of everything.

Doug Menuez: I have had a funny career over the last 20 years. I’ve probably reinvented myself three or four times, which is always difficult, but I find that by challenging myself I can stay fresh and find new approaches to my work. What I feel is a [consistency] to all my work — and that I’m very conscious about — is storytelling and simple human emotion. When I started out I was roaming the streets of Manhattan, at 14 or 15 years old, trying to be Cartier-Bresson. Documentary work was really where my heart was. I went from a Fine Art major into newspapers: the “Washington Post,” on up to “Time,” “Life,” and “Newsweek” — all through the ’80s shooting the magazines. And in the journalism world you’re shooting for 3 million readers. Your interpretation — your intuitive stuff — kind of gets knocked down. They’re using the lowest common denominator picture.

What I’m really enjoying about advertising is that there’s a journalistic component, in that you’re story telling — at least in the work that I’m doing. I’m being hired for my eye right now and it’s a storytelling kind of picture they’re after, except that I can be more interpretive, more fine art, than I could ever be in journalism. You know, I really want to die an artist and I really want to do issue-oriented photography, as well. And the advertising photography is paying well enough that it’s allowing me to shoot personal projects that I care about.

So I’m trying to put together a life in photography that’s sustainable for my family and myself. A lot of my peers have had to abandon their families when they’re overseas all the time. I do spend a lot of time on the road, but what I’m trying to do is create a compromise where I can work on the edge of Art and Commerce, where I can do my personal work on the side and get as much of it into the commercial work as I can. I feel like I’m in a good space because with the campaigns I’m getting they just want me to shoot what I’d be shooting anyway. So I’m really lucky right now. We just finished a bunch of fun campaigns for people like Nokia, Saab, and Chevrolet.

creativepro.com: How much do you travel?

Doug Menuez: About two weeks a month — about 150,000 miles a year. We just came off the road; we’ve been on the road since January 5th. When we need certain backgrounds for ad campaigns we’ll go overseas. Sometimes [the client] will say, “Find a place that looks like Italy,” at other times, “Go to Italy.” It depends on their budget. In my work as a journalist over the years I’ve done extended stories in other countries from time to time. I’ve done work in the Amazon and Brazil, I’ve done work on religious ceremonies, and I’ve done stories about the Basque country in Spain — a long-term project there. In the ’80s I did a story on the famine in Ethiopia, and I’ve done a lot of work in China.

creativepro.com: You mentioned running around Manhattan with a camera at 15. How did your career path unfold? Where did you get your training?

Doug Menuez: Well, I started when I was 12. Like a lot of people, my Dad gave me a camera and I built a darkroom. I was pretty serious; I was covering Vietnam War protests for the “Long Island Duck” when I was 14, and then I got a job as an apprentice in a studio when I was 15.

creativepro.com: So you’re self-taught?

Doug Menuez: Yeah, pretty much. I was shooting and learning, but I felt pretty accomplished by the time I got to art school. I went to the Art Institute of San Francisco; I had moved out to San Francisco from New York. That was really important for fine-art printmaking technique, in which I improved a lot. I had Ansel Adams’s printers teaching me. Then I switched into journalism and gained some new skills. You know, you learn as you go.

creativepro.com: Your book “15 Seconds: The Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1989” documents the Loma Prieta earthquake. Did you experience that firsthand?

Doug Menuez: Yeah. I was at the World Series at Candlestick Park shooting for “USA Today.” It was really a scene and I thought, “Wow, this is the big one,” because I got knocked on my butt. I got out of the park first: I was leaving because I had bursitis in my shoulder and I was in a lot of pain. I wasn’t going to finish the game. I’d already shot [earlier games in the series.] But I ended up working around-the-clock for four days straight anyway. I could barely lift the camera. I went to the Marina and shot the fire, then I got a helicopter and was in the air for three days. I would fly all over and just kept dropping the film out of a helicopter onto the trailer at Candlestick Park. The only place that had water and power were those trailers where the AP was set up.

We only printed 75,000 copies of “15 Seconds.” It was the first book that used Photoshop to do separations. It was my idea because of my relationship with people in the [Silicon] Valley. We had a lot of people come up with [resources]. I called John Sculley, he sent me ten Macs; I called Adobe and they brought their team. As it turned out, we could only get four pages separated in time. But it was the first book to do that. We gave all the proceeds to earthquake victims.

creativepro.com: So you apparently have some interest and training in computer technology.

Doug Menuez: Yeah, I know enough to be dangerous. I never read the manuals! (Laughs.)

creativepro.com: You also spent a significant portion of your career covering folks at Adobe, Sun, NeXT, and other high-tech companies.

Doug Menuez: In 1986 I got an opportunity to meet Steve Jobs and I convinced him to let me document him. And then I got “Life” magazine to assign me to do it. That became a three-year project on how a start-up technology company invents a new technology. And that grew into projects for Adobe and Apple and Sun, like you mentioned, and tons of other companies. I wound up doing that over a ten-year period and now I have a library of about 100,000 images of all those companies.

creativepro.com: So the book “Defying Gravity: The Making of Newton” was part of that?

Doug Menuez: Yeah, it’s one of those projects. It was a two-year thing on Apple inventing the Newton. My idea was to show the human side of that industry, [in spite of] all the hype. It was pretty tough — one guy shot himself during the project. The pressure was enormous. It was a really tough project, for them and for me. They wrote a million lines of code in a year and then tore it up. I was there until 3 a.m. almost every night. It was just nutty. To tell you the truth, I got really burnt out on Silicon Valley at the end of that project because there’s just so much hype and so much bull—-.

creativepro.com: I noticed that your book “Women of Power” covers the fashion world — a far cry from Silicon Valley technology.

Doug Menuez: (Laughs.) Well, I’m doing a lot more fashion these days. In ways, that’s even more stressful — they’re psycho! But I’m doing this as an outsider, very naïve. I’m just interested in it as a story; the way [the fashion industry] appropriates culture from other places and makes that our culture.

creativepro.com: So how did you end up covering the fashion world?

Doug Menuez: In 1990, in the middle of the whole technology project I got a call from Smith & Hawken. They were looking for a photojournalist because they were starting a catalog. So I wound up doing sportswear for them and helping to create the whole “real people” catalog look. And that led to working for Robert Redford for two years, starting his catalog.

Then we did a lot of Eddie Bauer work. And we would do these very documentary journalistic shoots — and oh, by the way, the people are wearing Eddie Bauer clothes. So it was a different approach to fashion or sportswear. But my experience in couture — high fashion — is very minimal. Every year we kind of do one high-fashion project with an Italian designer or for some of the fashion magazines. But I’m not thought of as a fashion photographer.

creativepro.com: Do you hope to change that with this book?

Doug Menuez: No. I think this book is a portrait of these women. They may have some cool clothes on at some point, but it’s not about fashion. It’s more about these women who’ve had amazing careers, and now they’re 80. They’ve moved out of the limelight. Nobody’s paying any attention to them, but they’re still doing it; they’re still building buildings, or taking photographs, or whatever they’re doing.

creativepro.com: With such up-close experience with technology, you must have done some digital photography.

Doug Menuez: Yes, we have a Nikon D1. (Note that this interview occurred in 2001.) I think I was the first person in San Francisco to get one. I use it instead of Polaroid, because I’m shooting candid moments. You know, if you shoot it on Polaroid, well, great, you don’t have it [later]. But shooting on a D1 I can immediately show the client what they’re getting. If they love it, then we have that. If we had to use that image, we could. It just makes me feel more secure than with a Polaroid, where I’d have to go back and recreate that image [for the final shoot]. It’s never going to be the same, right?

creativepro.com: Do you digitally retouch your film photography?

Doug Menuez: Yes, we do all of it. We’re not digital people; we’re not known for that. But my whole portfolio is printed on an Epson 9000 printer and everything was separated in Photoshop in RGB color space. We’ll definitely dodge or burn, intensify and saturate (I’m not moving heads or anything). I’m a printmaker that way. It’s a digital darkroom. I’m totally into that. We’re the only people in the world to have done 2 million passes on our Epson 9000.

creativepro.com: In your opinion, will digital photography ever replace traditional film?

Doug Menuez: I think it’s a lot closer. I would have laughed a year ago. I think it’s actually possible now. I know some people working secretly on some amazing chips. Six-megapixels is getting closer, but for me it’s also an ergonomic and a form-factor issue. For instance, the D1 is super cool, but the aspect ratio is a problem, and it takes too long to record to disk at high resolution. When I can pick up a camera and I don’t know whether it’s a digital or a film camera, ever; when I can push the shutter whenever I want, I don’t see why it wouldn’t replace film. The resolution it’s got now is pretty close. We’ll see. It’s starting to happen.

creativepro.com: Tell me about “My Year in the Wilderness.”

Doug Menuez: (Laughs.) That was a show and a book we did of about 20 years of my personal work. Well, more, really: Some of those shots are from when I was 14. It was [documenting] the struggle to find my voice as an artist. You’ll hear a lot of students in photo classes going, “What’s my style. I’ve got to have a style!” Forget that!

But the truest work I’ve ever done was that project, because this was a box that I’d been throwing prints into for 20 years. You know, everywhere I go on assignment I walk around with my Leica. For most of the years that I was doing journalism I wasn’t doing personal work. Occasionally I’d be in Dublin or Brazil or somewhere and I’d have my Leica. I’d bang off a roll or two, just walking around the streets, looking for pictures. And then one summer I found this box [of those old photos] and I really liked it. I found all these pictures that had a resonance and that worked together. And there was a [continuity] to them that went back 30 years.

I noticed that in some of my current work I was shooting more like I did when I was 18 or 19. I was coming back full circle. So it was kind of a wake-up call: This is where I should really focus, this is the true me. I’m looking at subtle moments of interaction; subtle emotion, contradiction, and ambiguity.

So I decided to pull it all together and we had a show at a small gallery in San Francisco. So that was a nice touchstone for me from which to move forward and take that into advertising as a baseline — a reference point — for my work as I grow.

creativepro.com: Do you have an underlying philosophy or style that characterizes your approach to photography?

Doug Menuez: I think that it’s to respect the subjects and to seek out the true story and to try to find the commonality among people. In my work, hopefully I’m communicating a true emotion that resonates with the viewer as a true moment. It’s like I’m constantly seeking that — it’s a process — and I keep refining it and keep looking. And that’s what drives me — just a curiosity about what motivates people, human behavior.

creativepro.com: Your Web site lists some “minibooks.” Can you tell me about those?

Doug Menuez: Well, after I did that book on Apple — and it almost killed me — my wife has forbidden me to do any more! So as an outlet we create small [books] — ten-, twenty-, thirty-page folios that we hand stitch. We might make a hundred of them and we call them the minibooks. I do about one or two a year. There are about ten of them so far.

creativepro.com: So where do you go from here? What projects do you have planned?

Doug Menuez: We have too much planned! (Laughs.) We’re working on a book right now about Tequila — the town of Tequila, Mexico, as well as the making of Tequila. We went to Heradura, the distillery, and I shot the naked men in the vats making the Tequila. They strip naked and they get into these vats and pull out the pulp. They can’t wear their clothes in there because the acid from the agave will eat through the cotton. And they’re so poor they only have one set of clothing. We shot a picture-essay story about love and ancient Mexican tradition and the culture and Tequila. We’re looking at a book and a show, and a series of events around Tequila that will be fun. But it’s a fine-art documentary — kind of a fashion, pop-culture thing.

We’re also doing [the] book about older women. That’s an ongoing project that’s been delayed by about a year. And we’re doing a book about hardcore American stock-car races, below the Nascar level. We’ve been shooting in central Michigan — these hardcore, blue-collar guys who put their last dime into these cars and race ’em.

creativepro.com: Is this because racing is a personal interest of yours?

Doug Menuez: Yes. (Laughs.) I’m obsessed right now with formula-one. It’s not the same thing. Probably what I would be doing if I weren’t a photographer is trying to be a [race car] driver. I love going fast!