Doug Menuez / FEARLESS GENIUS: THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION IN SILICON VALLEY 1985-2000

Doug Mmenuez. Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley 1985–2000

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