Building on his involvement with the Day In The Life books, Menuez (pronounced "Menuay) has put together a network of pros and topnotch credentials. Those who’ve worked with Reportage include Barry Lewis of Network photo agency in London; Robin Moyer; Peter Charlesworth; and Greg Davis, all contributors to Life. Along with photography, Reportage has also provided its clients with design services, working with New York designers Will Hopkins and Mary Kay Baumann, both of whom have long-term photography connections, and a long string of prestigious awards.

Created in 1989 and incorporated earlier this ear, Reportage has already parlayed its initial success in Silicon Valley into jobs with a global reach. The Reportage team, for instance did a number of projects for Farallon, a California-based high-tech firm, including a series of promotional postcards. The success of those projects led to move work at Farallon’s offices in Paris, Munisch and London. Other international clients include Beckman Instruments’ offices in Toronto and New Orleans, and Salomon Brothers in Zurich and Frankfurt.

In shooting and overseeing these job and others, Menuez logged 200,000 miles last year, circling the world three times on mostly corporate assignments. Among his farflung destinations: Beijing, Hamburg and the Greek island of Rhodes, where, instead of taking in the ancient sites and the gorgeous beaches, he and his Reportage crew organized a multi-media presentation for ACER, a Taiwan-based computer company which makes IBM clones.

For ACER’s international sales conference on Rhodes, attended by 800 people, Reportage put on quite a show: A crew of 12 still and video photographers and printers created images, which were displayed via live feeds connected to a 80-foot rear-projection screen, and published in a daily conference newsletter produced on computer. ("We brought in a UPI technician to set up a darkroom on the roof of the hotel," Menuez recalls. "They put us in this pigeon-shit-infested cement coop on the roof, and this poor bastard was up there in the heat, printing night and day.") Special effects for ACER’s theatrical show—all organized by Reportage—included the release of balloons and live doves, and the running of a smoke machine.

But the core of Reportage’s business is the work suggested by its name: documenting corporations, photo-j style. Reportage’s basic service consists of a photographer roaming the office shooting unposed pictures from a "fly-on-the-wall" perspective that aim to give a real sense of what the company is about. "My goal is not to glorify a specific business," says Menuez, "but to recognize and celebrate the people who work there day in and day out."

The key to Reportage’s unique approach is time. Rather than using the traditional day rate, Reportage offers its photographers on a monthly retainer, with a minimum of six months on each job. For a fee of $8,000 to $5,000 a month, the company is granted very broad usage rights to all the photos produced. "We give them the right to use the pictures in all collateral materials, for any in-house usage such as displays, for brochures and annual reports" says Menuez. "Basically they get all rights except advertising." The basic fee also includes consultation with the company on how best to use the photos; project management and design services on specific projects are billed as extras, as are the production of color images which require more lighting.

This overall set-up has several advantages for the clients, says Menuez. First, by letting him and his photographers shoot at random over time, clients accumulate a library of candid, dramatic shoots that they can sue for annual reports, brochures, internal newsletters, etc. Second, they build morale by documenting the contribution of their employees, reinforcing team spirit.

Reportage’s virtual overnight success is due, Menuez believes, to historical timing. "This is a real interesting time in our country’s history," he says. "Problems like debt, declining productivity and inadequate education are forcing corporations to change. They’re getting concerned about the human element, and that’s what my photos show, the human involvement, the human emotions, the human community that makes a company work."

Over periods ranging from six months to a year, the photographers shoot on location about once a week, several hours a day. So they don’t wear out their welcomes, they typically limit their in-office days to only a few hours at a time.

So far, clients have praised the sensitivity and discretion of the Reportage crew, and, in hiring, Menuez definitely looks for a sense of tact. "In all the time I’ve been doing this," he says. "There have only been one or two incidents where people have blown up and said ‘Get that f---n’ camera out of my face.’ "

While remaining obtrusive, however, Reportage photographers also probe beneath the glossy surface of corporate life. "I’m not trying to go in and do a rape job or anything, but if you do your job right, you’re always going to get pictures they don’t necessarily want you to make," Menuez says.

Despite being on the corporate payroll, Menuez believes there is more opportunity to get this kind of picture in his current work. "With magazines, you’re always in and out of people’s lives," he says. "With Reportage, you have the ability to spend time on a story, to get below the surface. But there’s an emotional price attached to that, too. You get involved personally. You see a lot of rough stuff and come across a lot of bodies by the wayside in the corporate world."

Conflict and tension, after all, are definitely part of the job, and some of Menuez’s pictures show it. "Once at a sales conference, I turned and saw in one corner of the room, this guy, the head of sales, poking his finger menacingly in the direction of this woman," he says. "She had her arms folded, and her jaw was set, and you could clearly see what was going on—they were animated, angry, off in the corner. You could just see the intense intimidation, the fury, the competitiveness that goes on in these kinds of high-powered situations." Menuez got the picture, in silhouette.

A lot of his best pictures, he says, were captured in the traditional manner—f/8 and be there. "If you put in a lot of hours walking around—hanging out, talking about who’s doing what," he says, "it will all fall into place." On the second day of shooting his very first paid Reportage assignment, he walked by a conference room, and saw the shot that said it all—a group of men in suits silhouetted against a window, all shaking hands. "They had just concluded this seven-million-dollar sale," he says. "It was a very important day for the company." (Alas, Menuez had just run out of Tri-X; luckily, pushing Plus-X did the trick in capturing the moment.)

Sometimes, the lucky pictures have a more personal subject matter. Once, at a corporate Christmas party in Silicon Valley, Menuez got a great shot of a man bending a woman backwards in a passionate kiss. "That picture had a lot of repercussions," he says, nothing that it was displayed on the wall to a lot of company comment-and four months later, the couple was married.

Menuez’ work documenting the corporate drama began with a desire to make a career move out of photojournalism. A former newspaper photographer, Menuez had made a name for himself doing news photography and lighting-on-location assignments for national magazines such as Newsweek, Time and Fortune as well as newspapers like The Washington Post and USA Today.

By 1986, he had double burn-out. "News photography is tough work," he says. "I’d seen man’s inhumanity to man for real-people being killed, 100,000 starving children, one man beaten another to death. I’d been shot at, had knives pulled on me. I have a wife and a son; I didn’t want to abandon my family for work, and I wanted to protect and make them safe." He was also tired of the more glamorous magazine work he’d been doing, trying to create the illusion of spontaneity while inundating his subjects with studio lights to make a perfect color portrait.

He knew he wanted to get back to his roots in black-and-white photography, but he didn’t know exactly how. As it turns out, his next move was NeXT, the computer company started by Steven Jobs after his unceremonious ouster from Apple. That was the subject suggested by Menuez’s mentor, Rick Smolan, who had brought Menuez into the DILTO orbit with A Day In The Life Of America. This time, Smolan introduced Menuez to the people at NeXT, as a photographer with the perfect talent to document the new company’s growth.

At first, Menuez was skeptical. "I was looking for a sexy, heavy subject, like teenage prostitution," he says. I thought of Silicon Valley as the valley of death."

This was definitely a personal project: There was no money to be made on it. (The company offered to pay him $500 a month for film and processing expenses.) But he would be able to retain all the rights to his work, and he would, he felt, get in on the ground floor of what could be an important start-up venture. Not only is Jobs a very high-profile national figure, but his vision of himself is frankly messianic-with NeXT, he believed that he would change the world by placing unprecedented power in the hands of students, scientists and researchers. Given that sense of mission, it seemed only natural to record their actions for posterity.

Menuez decided to give the project a try, intrigued by the unusual terms of the work: he was allowed to roam around the company virtually at will to shoot whatever he wanted. The only degree of control was exercised by creative director Susan Kare, who decided on which days he would be invited in. He worked at NeXT, on average, about once a week, for several hours at a time, for about two years.

What he found in Silicon Valley surprised him. "Little did I know," he says, "what an incredible microcosm of human experience was waiting for me behind those fluorescent-lit cubicle walls. Love, people, stabbing each other in the back, strong bonds, friendship, political intrigue-it was all there. And all untapped photographically, at least on a long-term basis."

He witnessed and documented all the stages of the new enterprise: He was there shooting when Ross Perot showed up to support the project with $20 million of venture capital. He was there when the NeXT computer first sprang to life, when data first blinked across its screen, when the first sounds came out of the black box.

He was there to catch Jobs in some dramatic and very characteristic moments-waving his hands and cajoling the workforce with that visionary gleam in his eyes. "He fascinated me," Menuez says. "His attention span is about 20 seconds on any one thing. If you walk up and make a superfluous remark, if he smells fear or pretense or ignorance, he’ll absolutely level you with a single sentence."

NeXT had no specific plans for Menuez’s prints, but they have been displayed extensively around the office-formally. "After awhile," Menuez says, "it began to remind me of working on a small-town newspaper. There was that terrific feedback, that feeling I was proving something they truly valued and enjoyed. I’d arrive with this month’s pictures and it would be a sensation. Everybody would gather around. Even if what I showed was embarrassing, somehow they accepted it."

From the corporate perspective, the project was deemed a success. "When we were growing and building the facility, we did very simple things with the environment, such as surrounding ourselves with the moments Doug captured," says NeXT co-founder Dan’l Lewin. "Most of the conference rooms were decorated with his pictures, and when we were interviewing new people, the human-ness created by those pictures really helped."

Among the people to notice the photos were representatives from a venture capital firm called Technology Funding-they were very interested in the idea of corporate documentation, and became Menuez’s first paying client, in 1987. By 1988, he had enough corporate work to start turning down magazine assignments; and by the following year, he had developed the idea sufficiently to trademark the Reportage logo.

At first, Menuez did all the shooting himself. This year, however, he realized that the "best way to serve the clients is with local photojournalists in the same locations the offices. That guarantees better access."

With the basic structure of an international network now in place, Menuez is planning to expand through self-promotion. He’s currently putting together a portfolio of 11 x 4 black-and-white prints to send to prospective clients, many of whom are recommended by the photographers. All the custom printing is being done by Alex Ivanon in Sausalito, who also does all of Reportage’s print work from around the world. "We want to have all the prints done by one person for a consistent approach and to maintain quality control," Menuez says. "And Ivanov is a master, who really cares about the finished print."

Skeptics may say that Menuez has "sold out" by doing work for corporations, but he believes that Reportage is an extension of the documentary tradition in which he has deep roots. After all, he points out, many great photographers have worked for corporations-from Eugene Smith to many legendary Magnum shooters. And, he adds, the work must be judged on its own merits. "The people who criticize this based on the approach alone remind me of the people in art school: they all liked my street pictures, until they found out I had done them while I was working for a newspaper. The fact that I had been paid for them made me a ‘sell-out’-even though they admitted the pictures were good."

Menuez’s social-concern credentials are impeccable: his father was a community organizer, a consultant to Martin Luther King, Cesar Chaves, Saul Alinsky; Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale were guests at his family’s home. "I was brought up racial and left-wing and went through the Sixties," he says. "I fell in love with photography at the age of 14 when my father gave me a copy of The Concerned Photographer. Eugene Smith was my hero, and I actually shook his hand at 17." Recently, he demonstrated his personal brand of entrepreneurial altruism by publishing a book called 15 Seconds which raised $50,000 for the victims of the San Francisco earthquake.

Would he work for any corporation willing to pay him? Probably not, he says, but "that’s a very big question: can photographers rest easy with every company they work for-like doing cigarette ads, which promote cancer?" He says he’ll have to deal with such situations on a case-by-case basis. But he believes such issues won’t arise very often, because his method of working does have a sort of built-in selection factor: Only the most progressive companies are willing to give the kind of unrestricted access he requires, to "let this loose cannon on the deck," as he outs it.

"Basically, I try to do the best work I can, so that I can face myself in the mirror each morning. So far, I feel good about the companies and the people I’ve worked for."