Doug Menuez. Steve Jobs Rallies the Troops. Redwood City, California, 1988. Gelatin silver print. Artist’s collection, New York
Doug Menuez. Steve Jobs Explaining Ten Year Technology. Development Cycles. Sonoma, California, 1986. Gelatin silver print. Artist’s collection, New York
The Day Ross Perot Gave Steve Jobs Twenty Million Dollars. Fremont, California, 1986.
Steve Jobs Returning from an Employee Picnic. Santa Cruz Highway, California, 1987.
The Founders of Adobe Systems Preparing to Release Photoshop. Mountain View, California, 1988.
Portrait of Russell Brown in Costume. Mountain View, California, 1989.
John Sculley Masters His Shyness to Meet the Press. Fremont, California, 1990.
Bill Gates Says No One Should Ever Pay More Than Fifty Dollars for a Photograph. Laguna Niguel, California, 1992.
Frustration. Sun Microsystems. Santa Clara, California, 1992.
Preparations for the Demonstration Are Not Going Well. Las Vegas, 1992.
Steve Jobs Considers a Response. Palo Alto, California, 1986.
The Newton War Room at Apple Computer. Cupertino, California, 1993.
A Dog of Autodesk. San Rafael, California, 1995
Exercise Break at Intel Fab 11X. Rio Rancho, New Mexico, 1998.
exhibition is over
1, Manege Square (
www.moscowmanege.ru
For fifteen years, I documented the efforts of a secretive tribe of engineers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley as they created technology that would change our culture, our behavior and challenge what it means to be human.
My project began in 1985 when Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple and began his quest for redemption by attempting to build a super computer for education. Steve represented the freewheeling sensibility of the times, combining his idealistic, hippie vision and design aesthetic with the space-race ambitions of the prior generation. I wanted to understand his process of innovation and believed that by photographing Steve I could also gain insights into the larger subject of Silicon Valley itself. I requested special access to shadow Steve and his team, and he immediately agreed. After three years, I expanded my project, gaining the trust and private access to every major innovator and over seventy companies, often for years at a time. I continued shooting through the rise of the internet and dot-com boom of the 1990’s, generating 250,000 negatives over the life of the project.
In 2004, Stanford University Library acquired my archive. To date, approximately 7,000 images have been scanned, from which the selection of images presented here were chosen. After I retouched the files, they were output to digital negatives and printed by hand on traditional silver gelatin paper.
Doug Menuez, February, 2012, New York City