Doug Menuez spent 15 years in the middle of what many call the golden era of Silicon Valley. Between 1985 and 2000, he had unparalleled access to Steve Jobs, Steve Capps, and 70 other people and companies, including Adobe and NeXT. His amazing archive of images comprise one of the richest records of this seminal moment in American and technological history.
Still, his negatives sat unpublished for years, due largely to the photographer's "burnout on the subject" and the cost of scanning all those images*, but they recently were released in the book Fearless Genius. Menuez has been traveling the world talking about what it was like to witness the rise of the digital age. What’s surprised him most, he says, is how little even those in the tech industry know about this key moment in time.
“It’s been shocking to see how many people don’t know their own history,” he says.
Menuez hopes to change that because he believes the people he documented created a rich and vital culture that has disappeared. Back then, he says, Silicon Valley was focused on building technology that would fundamentally change things like education for the better. Information wanted to be free, for the betterment of all. “People fucking died and went to the psych ward and marriages broke up because people were reaching for new things that were really, really hard,” he says. There's still a bit of that idealism, he says, but there's also too much time spent building mobile games and yet another social network.
The next step for Menuez is a documentary featuring interviews with some of the figures he photographed all those years ago. He accepts that we cannot live in the past, but says he wants to keep pushing people to remember an era of invention and bold thinking that has not been equaled since.
"I want us to be more cognizant of the values they had had back in 1980s and '90s," he says. “I don’t want to leave the impression that I think Silicon Valley is a dead forest these days. But I do think things have changed."
*UPDATE 12 pm PT 11/05/14: An earlier version of this post misstated why Menuez's images went unpublished for so many years.
