Merging Art With Commerce.

Now, a sports and fashion photography professional, Doug Menuez feels he’s a fine-art photographer at heart. And that’s what, Doug says he really wants to do… that and more!

As he juggles commercial and fine art work, Doug is also working on a book about the relationship between Tequila and Mexican culture.  In an interview with Shriya Patil, Doug says, he seeks advertising assignments that will allow him to express his ideas and his vision even as he purses personal work and fine-art documentary photography.

Doug, now famous as an photojournalist, began his career as an intern at the Washington Post, shooting news, sports and celebrities for Time, Newsweek, Life, people and Fortune Magazines. He covered major news stories including the famine in Ethiopia, the destruction of the Amazon, the Aids crisis, drug wars, professional campaigns, the Olympics, five SuperBowl’s an the World Series. He’s done portraits of celebrities like Mother Teresa, Robert Redford, Bill Clinton ad Bill Gates and was selected to shoot for nine of the ‘Day in the Life’ series books, including the recent ‘A Day in the Life of Africa’ for which he shot the cover, and the best-selling “A Day in the Life of America’. His work has also been featured in ‘24 Hours in Cyberspace’, ‘Circle of Life’, ‘One Digital Day’, and many others.

Tell us about yourself, your childhood inspirations and dreams, your influences while growing up. How did you first venture into photography? What attracted you to photography?

Initially, I wanted to be an artist initially and spent a lot of time studying the great impressionists. By the time I turned twelve, I had built a darkroom and switched to photography. My dad gave me an old Argus C3, which I later traded in for Nikkormat. I was shooting demonstrations against the Vietnam War for local alternative newspapers in New York in High School and assisting in a studio.

Around the time my dad gave me the book ‘The Concerned Photographer’ with work by Robert Capa, Cartier-Bresson and others and it changed my life. Then I discovered W. Eugene Smith and began to dream of being documentary photographer, hoping to change the world. I studied fine art documentary photography in San Francisco then switched to photojournalism. I got a job with the local newspaper near San Francisco and worked my way up to secure an internship at the Washington Post, which led eventually to a career shooting for magazines. Later I began doing advertising.

We have noticed that most of your photos are a combination of photojournalism and commercial…do you prefer shooting both the subjects more than anything else?

My goal is finding moments that reveal simple emotional truths about human experience. I am fascinated by human behavior and what we all have in common. I love stories of people’s lives. Photojournalism honed my skills under pressure but documentary work is what I constantly return in my personal projects, as it allows me more time to know, understand, and work on different subjects

While documentary work may be subset of photojournalism I was not getting enough time for my assignments. Also, I had started experimenting with fine art. That for me means that I allow my personal interpretation to enter the image. I can do more complex work. The best part about this is that I don’t think about broad audience or communicating to the lowest common denominator as I did in magazine photojournalism.

As regards commercial work, I have been very lucky to be hired to shoot advertising jobs, which I’m told is due to ‘my creative eye.’ This work provides security for me and my family and money for me to do personal projects. I don’t change how I see or shoot for commercial work. It’s all about trying to make good pictures.

What’s your favorite subject…what do you look for when you plan to shoot?

My favorite thing to do is roam the streets wherever I am with no plan or structure, just looking for moments to capture on camera.

After all these years in photography, what are the changes you have seen in the field? Have the changes influenced your style of working?

The biggest change is the massive influx of people taking up photography. The field was wide open when I first started shooting. This has created tremendous competition. In photojournalism and commercial photography as well, there’s now a terrifying demand by publishers and clients to own all rights.

The lack of respect for traditional rights of photographers and other artists is a bg but gradual change, and very troubling to say the least. Of course, the advent of digital is a big change. I no longer work in the conventional darkroom but in the digital darkroom. It’s not quite there yet, in terms of substrates we can print on when compared to beautiful silver photo paper, but it’s quite close. None of these changes have influenced my style of working except in terms of the equipment.

What style of photography do you concentrate on?

No particular style. I would rather let the subject speak directly to the viewer without the filter of my “style”. I suppose certain themes and compositions as well emotions recur in my work and might be termed stylistic, but this is not a conscious effort to have a particular style.

 It’s true that photographers wishing to become well known should create a special style, as it is just easier to remember that persons work.

I’m not after that, as I see style as a trap within which I would be quickly bored. I cannot imagine waking up and having to shoot to an expected lighting technique or the same thing every day, I’d kill myself. I have too short an attention span.

As a person, how do you react to situations and how differently does the photographer in you perceive the same situation while shooting?

I wonder sometimes if my life as an observer has cut me off from certain “normal” human responses. I think the camera allows photographers to remain detached and calm in a

“The lack of respect for traditional rights of photographers and other artists is a big but gradual change, and very troubling to say the least. My goal is finding moments that reveal simple emotional truths about human experience”

crisis. If you pursue that long enough maybe you lose the ability to feel. I don’t perceive situations differently whether I am shooting or not. Everything I see is viewed as a potential picture and if no camera is at hand, then it remains with a lot of my best shots, unfortunately in my memory.

Tell us about some particularly memorable shoot.

Once when I was aboard a Russian Icebreaker bound for the North Pole, I was awakened at 3 AM by drunken ex KGB guards wielding shotguns, and dragged to cargo helicopter. There were a dozen people on board drinking de-icing fluid that’s stronger then Vodka, and we took off from the deck of the moving ice breaker into an artic storm.

Shortly thereafter we landed on the ice and as the snow cleared suddenly the giant ice- breaker appeared crashing through the ice headed right for us.

The ice was breaking beneath our pontoons as the ship closed in on us and the pilot, who was also drinking, laughed, and took off just in time to avoid being crushed. I managed to shoot a few photos even though I was terrified. They thought the whole thing was hilarious and passed me the bottle!

According to you, is digital photography just a new phase or an easy alternative to the conventional method?

I have debated in digital since the early 1980s so it is not exactly new. There is nothing easy about doing digital either. The easy part is a myth. It’s great technology and can be very flexible but there are serious limitations, just as there are with film, only different.

Technique, science, art and sentiment. Ho do you relate these to images you create?

I’m not particular about my equipment or technique; however I have great respect for technique and learning the basics, rules that provide a basic context for you to grow as an artist. For me, cameras and lenses are just tools. They are the means to the end result of the photograph. You must learn the science to make the pictures, although these days there are so many improvements to cameras that many new photographers never really learned. I prefer to keep things very simple (same film, camera, a few lenses).

What is it that motivates the photographer in you?

Waking up and breathing motivates me enough to take pictures!

And finally, what advice would you give to young, aspiring photographers?

Don’t pay any attention to competition or let that stop you. Figure out what you have to say, what you want to show and reveal. Find out what you are passionate about and work on that as though “ you are on fire.” There is no reward without risk, and you must be willing to take chances.

And there is no success without failure I’m sorry to say, but so far, this appears to me to be very true. So don’t be afraid to make a fool of yourself, its very freeing.