Doug Menuez

Doug Menuez (born 1957) is an American photographer. His career encompasses photojournalism, documentary, commercial, and commissioned photography. He has traveled to the North Pole, the Amazon, Vietnam, Africa, Dubai, Japan, and other regions of the world.

“I know how to tell a story, but there’s a deeper thing I’m trying to get to now that can’t be expressed with a caption.”^[1]

Biography

Menuez was born in Texas. His father moved the family to the south side of Chicago to work for the community organizer, Saul Alinsky. They moved, again, to Long Island where his father continued working as an organizer. His mother counseled conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War. He studied art and photography at the San Francisco Art Institute and San Francisco State University, graduating from SFSU with a bachelor’s degree in photojournalism. He worked as a photojournalist from 1979 to the middle of the 1990s. From then, until 2004, he managed his own commercial photography studio in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2004, he moved to New York with his wife and son. He and his wife reside in New York City.

Photojournalism

Upon graduating from SFSU in 1981, Menuez began an internship at The Washington Post. From then, until 1994, he accepted editorial assignments for magazines and newspapers, including: Time, Newsweek, Life magazine, and others. These assignments included the 1984-85 Ethiopian famine, the Olympics, the Amazon, the World Series, presidential campaigns, Silicon Valley, the AIDS crisis and other events.

Silicon Valley

From 1986 to 1988, Doug Menuez documented Steve Jobs’ new company NeXT Inc. and its development and launch of the computer NeXT Computer for Life magazine.At Apple Computer, Doug Menuez documented various projects, including the Apple Newton from its early stages in 1992 to its launch in 1993. In 1992, Menuez published, with Markos Kounalakis, the book, Defying Gravity: The Making of Newton.

Between 1988 and 1995, Menuez documented the corporate life and the early development of PDF, and the development of Adobe Photoshop at Adobe Systems San Jose, California.

The 250,000 photographs Menuez shot, documenting Silicon Valley from 1986 to 2000, are now archived in the Douglas Menuez Photography Collection at Stanford University Library.^[2]

Books

Heaven, Earth, Tequila: Un Viaje al Corazón de Mexico is a portrait of Mexican culture through the traditions of growing, producing, and drinking Tequila in the Jalisco region, as told by Menuez in black and white and color photographs.

In 2007, Menuez visited sub-Saharan Africa to photograph the Children of Uganda, a 22-member dance troupe comprising children and young adults, orphaned by AIDS and civil war. Published in 2008, with an introduction by Dame Elizabeth Taylor, Transcendent Spirit: The Orphans of Uganda ^[3] is a photo-essay of the East African dance troupe.

Doug Menuez was a contributor to nine of the Day in the Life series of books. As one of one hundred photojournalists, Menuez visited Africa in 2002 to shoot for the book, A Day in the Life of Africa.^[4] Menuez’s portrait of a member of the famously camera-shy Maasai tribe of Tanzania is on the cover.

In the mid-1990s, Menuez took on commercial work with several global brands. In 2008, Emirates Airlines commissioned him to document the culture and the region of Dubai.

Menuez built a relationship with Nikon founded on his first camera, the Nikkormat and its 50mm lens. He developed a professional relationship with Nikon to test their equipment. In 2008 they worked together, traveling in Vietnam to test the D700.

Published works

Defying Gravity: The Making of Newton. Photographs by Doug Menuez; introduction by Paul Saffo; text by Marcos Kounalakis. 176 p. : ill. Beyond Words, Hillsboro (OR), 1993. ISBN#: 0941831949

Heaven, Earth, Tequila: un viaje al corazón de México. Photographs by Douglas Menuez; introduction by Victor Villaseñor; text by Doug Menuez with Andrés Zamudio. 141, [6] p. : ill. Waterside Press, Cardiff-by-the-Sea (CA), 2005. ISBN#: 0976680106

Transcendent Spirit: The Orphans of Uganda. Photographs by Douglas Menuez; introduction by Dame Elizabeth Taylor; text by Rachel Scheier. 151 p. : ill. Beaufort Books, New York, 2008. ISBN#: 9780825305856

A Day in the Life of Africa. David Elliot Cohen, Susan Wels and Lee Lieberman Foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. 288 p. : ill., maps. Tides Foundation, San Francisco, 2002. ISBN#: 0971802106

:15: Fifteen Seconds: The Great California Earthquake of 1989. David Elliot Cohen; Douglas Menuez and Ron Tussy, Editors. 119 p., [1] p. : ill. The Tides Foundation, San Francisco, 1989. ISBN#: 1559630418

Selected Artist’s Books:

Drag Meet: 1996. Sears Point Race Track, California. Amateur drag racers. Offset printing, edition of 500.

Facetime. 2006, Woodstock (NY). Various portraits, including: Robert Redford, Francis Ford Coppola, Bob Weir, Sonia Braga, Martin Cruz Smith, Delroy Lindo, Natasha Richardson, and others. Indigo printing, edition of 100.

My Year in the Wilderness. 1996. A collection of images 1970-1996 taken in various locations, including: Brazil, Italy, France, China and Spain. Inkjet printing on watercolor paper. Edition of 10.

Solo exhibitions:

2007

Studio B Gallery, Woodstock, New York, Infinite City: A Walk Around New York

Farmani Gallery, Los Angeles, California, Transcendent Spirit: The Orphans of Uganda.

Holbrook Art Center, Millbrook, New York, Heaven, Earth, Tequila: Un Viaje al Corazón de México.

2006

Innova Gallery Photokina: Cologne, Germany, Selected Works.

2005

Mexican Cultural Institute, Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Washington, D.C., Heaven, Earth, Tequila: Un Viaje al Corazón de México.

2004

Farmani Gallery: Los Angeles, California, Lucky Shots

1997

Digital Soup Gallery: Los Angeles, California, My Year in the Wilderness.

External links

• Official site

References

1. ^ Chronogram, May 2006
2. ^ Stanford Report, February 9, 2005
3. ^ Transcendent Spirit: The Orphans Of Uganda (Midpoint Trade Books Inc, 2007) by Douglas Menuez, Introduction by Dame Elizabeth Taylor
4. ^ A Day in the Life of Africa (Tides Foundation, 2002), by David Elliot Cohen and Lee Liberman

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Name	Menuez,Doug
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Date of birth	1957
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