“In a very real sense, I am starting my career from this moment. In many ways it is like starting over but of course with the benefit of hindsight and experience.”

A NEW PHASE

Readers of this blog can tell I’ve been missing in action from my usual 4 am post, pounding away at my keyboard.  And why? Well for the past four months we have been negotiating a deal to fund the preservation, development and marketing of my 1 million image archive. The good news is that we have successfully closed that deal. This means that the historic images of Silicon Valley now housed as part of the Douglas Menuez Collection at Stanford University Library can be scanned, researched and made available for scholars, and we can now finally edit, scan, keyword and market the many thousands of model-released images I have that are perfect for high end advertising. To that end my wife Tereza and I are starting a new company called Menuez Archive Projects, or MAP — more on that soon– and moving my studio from Kingston to a beautiful new space in a former gallery in West Chelsea. I’ve been joined by David Mendez, an accomplished Silicon Valley entrepreneur and film producer who is the new President of MAP, our studio manager Whitney Kidder, a budding photojournalist and well trained by my agents at Stockland Martel. We are hiring some other key staff soon to arrive. We are now in the midst of moving hell and I expect that to continue for the next few weeks. Here’s the new space just before the boxes arrived:

I’m very excited and energized at this new opportunity to build the next phase of my career. In this space and in my workshops I’ve been trying to share my journey to merge art and commerce and my thoughts about how to refine your personal vision to the purest form and then figure out how to make a living from that. I’ve often said it’s all about creating longevity and to build longevity for your career all your decisions have to align with your values and goals.

In a very real sense, I am starting my career from this moment. In many ways it is like starting over but of course with the benefit of hindsight and experience. Still, it’s really hard to find and follow your true path and I’m reminded of that daily and I’ll continue to share what I learn as I move forward. I do believe this new iteration will be the ideal way to synthesize all that I’ve done in the past, which will pave the way for what I do next. Of course all this talk makes me itch to get shooting ’cause it’s all about the pictures, right? More to come…