Menuez himself is currently going against the grain. After almost 20 years, first in newspaper and magazine photography, then in the related field of corporate and annual reports, Menuez has now set his sights on a vastly different realm: fashion.

Based in Mountain View, California, just outside of San Francisco, Menuez began pondering the move while deeply involved in another project, an undertaking that most would consider a crowning achievement in any photojournalist’s career. Fascinated by both computer technology and the minds that create it, Menuez spent a solid year covering the team that built the Newton, Apple Computer’s hand-held "digital assistant" (see "Doug Menuez Defying Gravity," PND, March 1994). Menuez’s book of photographs that eventually resulted, Defying Gravity (Beyond Words Publishing, 1993) was better received than the Newton itself. But even before the project was finished, Menuez felt he was coming to a crossroads, that it was time to start moving in a new direction.

"I felt like I was getting into something of a box with the black-and-white documentary work," he says. "And I’m not pushing that work aside, but you get to a plateau and you have a choice."

So, after a grueling day spent chasing a team of overworked, mercurial computer programmers all over the Silicon Valley, Menuez would climb into bed at night and muse upon a life of shooting fashion. He wasn’t a complete stranger to the rag trade, however. At this point, he had already been shooting clothes for five years, for Smith & Hawken, a company that makes upscale gardening togs for the PBS tote-bag crowd. S&H originally sought him out precisely because he was not a fashion photographer. "They decided they needed a photojournalist," says Menuez. "They wanted to use real people and they wanted to do a picture-story kind of approach. It was very different from what was going on in the mainstream fashion photography at the time. We would go out and find real gardeners and potters, dress them in the clothes and photograph them as they worked."

The shoots for Smith & Hawken, though, were still "a footnote" to his corporate and annual report work. It wasn’t until after Defying Gravity was published that Menuez started to put serious effort into seeking out more fashion assignments. His first step was to start experimenting with new styles of photography, which led him to eventually put together an entirely new portfolio and promo piece. For this, he first enlisted the help of his sister, Stephanie Menuez, then a struggling Los Angeles actress, now his West Coast rep.

"I knew that what I needed was a) to have a killer portfolio reflecting what I could do and b) to have a promotional piece that I could use to launch a campaign," he says. To this end, Menuez packed up and 8 x 10 view camera and headed down to L.A., where Stephanie had rounded up all her actor and model friends for a series of test shoots.

"I had needed to take a break from pursuing my acting career," Stephanie says, "and Doug’s offer to help produce the shoots and maybe start repping him were a godsend. Doug finagled his way into the Huntington Gardens and we did four setups there, we did some shots in Griffith Park and some others out in Westlake. I think the shoots we did together really helped bring Doug back to his roots in fine-art photography."

The most exhaustive effort, however, has gone into the creation of Menuez’s latest promotional piece, a 20-page booklet entitled Beauty/Truth-Portraits & Very Short Stories. The booklet contains not just recent fashion shots and tests, but pictures from all phases of Menuez’s career. The project started when Menuez met Steve Strauss, a partner in a local advertising agency, who eventually took on the job of editing down the hundreds of pictures. "Steve and I really hit it off,"Menuez recalls, "he was very sympathetic to this whole traditional period I was going through. So we started off with me gathering up 15 years of pictures, ranging from newspaper work, through magazine work and celebrity portraits, on up through the most recent fashion assignments. I wanted him to tell me, like a therapist, how to put it all together. Steve wove this disparate group of pictures together beautifully, seamlessly, and what we wound up with was a personal piece that’s probably got us a better response than if we did a straightforward, ‘Here’s some fashion shots, here’s some portraits’ kind of thing."

Menuez and Strauss later decided where new photos were needed and were able to build test shoots around the gaps, creating seven more pictures specifically for the promo. Menuez then supplied the "very short stories" included to accompany the photographs. "One day I was in bed with a 103-degree fever, and I just started writing. The stories weren’t exactly meant to be serious, but they’re true." For example, the story accompanying the photograph of Tereza Machado, Menuez’s Brazilian-born wife, is the story of how she came to America, took the name "Colombina" from a character in the film Black Orpheus and worked in a sweatshop, making handbags. Another story accompanies a picture of a young man in a dress suit and work boots. It tells of his ambitions, writing screenplays after a day’s work waiting tables. "One day," it goes, "he got the call. But it wasn’t what he was expecting."

So, with the portfolio and promo piece in hand and a year’s worth of successful sportswear shoots behind him, Menuez is now looking for editorial fashion assignments, finding it ironic that after a 20-year career he’s knocking on doors at the big magazines once again, A recent trip to New York netted him face-to-face interviews with art directors at, among others, Condé Nast, Hachette and Hearst magazines, as well as an assignment for Entertainment Weekly.

But does Menuez find the thought of making his way in the high-strung world of couture intimidating? "You know, I feel like I’m at the bottom rung of this whole fashion scene," he says, laughing about his novitiate status, "so it can only go up from here. I look up and all I see is blue sky." The strategy, he says, is to work on building the lead/client list, constantly send out the promo piece and then knock on doors with the portfolio. But he has no regrets about changing directions. "I’ve done all the horror stories," he says of his career as a photojournalist, "AIDS, drugs, politics, mayhem. I’ve been shot at, clubbed and maced and I’m ready for some beauty and glamour. I feel freer now than I’ve felt in years."