Juleff soon began photographing Detroit’s premier bodybuilders, many of whom worked out at the famed Yacos Gym operated by Douglas' longtime friend George Yacos. The photographs of these lifters and athletes, and their submission to the national physique publications popular at the time, helped establish Douglas as one of the most talented of the numerous photographers working during the golden age of physique photography.

During his heyday, Douglas’ images were featured frequently and prominently in Your Physique, Strength & Health, The Body Builder and other physique magazines. He also frequently was published in early issues of Athletic Model Guild's Physique Pictorial and the smaller Weider physique publications of the early 1950s, Adonis and Body Beautiful. Collectors even then particularly prized Douglas' prints, which are images of rare beauty.

Douglas' rising prominence as a physique photographer also helped cement the careers of a number of competitive bodybuilders and popular physique models, including Jim Park (Mr. America 1952); Bob Delmonteque, who became Douglas’ most photographed model; and Vic Seipke (Mr. Michigan 1951), a physical powerhouse whose photo sales generated more of Douglas’ income than any other single model. Among his other popular models were Stan Stanczyk, Al Walsh, Mike Dubel, Maynard Keith, Dick Buchholz (Mr. Michigan 1949), Michael Craver (Mr. Michigan 1948), Leo Maryck (Mr. Michigan 1947), Bill Hooper and Tom Talbott.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, when he was at his most prolific, Juleff worked a steady job in the photographic studio of the prominent Hudson’s Department Store, where he occasionally used the store’s photographic studio after hours to shoot male nudes, process his film and make prints for his clients. He was a master retoucher and was skilled in the darkroom arts. At a time when many physique photographers churned out product merely to meet the enormous demand for male nudes, Douglas truly viewed each image as an individual work of art, and that sensibiity was most evident in his skillful retouching work and his exquisite printing. His few extant toned prints are particularly prized by discerning collectors. Even half a century after they were printed, Douglas’ original prints are vibrant, luminous and exquisitely beautiful things to behold.

For many years, Douglas lived at home with his elderly father, where he also maintained the small studio space where many of his iconic images were shot. Several years after Douglas shot a series of photographs of Detroit police officer Wendell Meyer, one of the images of Meyer, holding his nightstick and sporting an erection, found its way onto the police captain's desk. Meyer lost his job, and his fellow officers searched and ransacked Juleff's home. The officers confiscated a great deal of material, and Juleff's father actually stoked their furnace with an additional stash of negatives and prints by other photographers that were part of Juleff's personal collection, trying to protect his son. It was an emotional and professional setback from which Juleff never fully recovered.

Picking up the torch at approximately the same time was one of Juleff's most ambitious models, Bob Delmonteque. Using the same business model established by photographers, Demonteque made an arrangement with Douglas to pose freely in exchange for negatives from which he could market his own prints to collectors. "It was like having a machine to print your own money," Delmonteque has said on more than one occasion, and the print sales generated through his own ads and personal sales in cities across the United States helped keep Douglas' beautiful images in the public consciousness. Although Vic Seipke may have earned the distinction of being Douglas' best-selling model, it was Delmonteque who became Douglas' most-published model of all time, despite his never having garnered a magazine cover with one of Douglas' images.

Although he effectively retired as a physique photographer when the majority of his work was destroyed, Juleff was fortnate to have had a stash of his work at the store where he worked, so not everything was sacrificed. In the late 1990s, encouraged by his friend and fellow photographer Dave Martin and the San Francisco collectors Robert Mainardi and Trent Dunphy, Juleff resurrected his existing negatives and worked with a professional photo lab in Detroit to make a series of new prints to show a publisher. These prints, coupled with select vintage prints from the private collection of another San Francisco collector, Bill Bryant, created a strong enough body of work to secure a book deal for Juleff. In 1998, his volume Douglas of Detroit was published as an installment in Janssen's series American Photography of the Male Nude 1940-1970.

Juleff enjoyed his brief burst of renewed fame, corresponding with and selling some of his recent prints to a small, select group of private collectors. His health deteriorated, however, and he suffered a number of maladies, including a duodenal ulcer and diabetes. He was hospitalized following a serious fall in his apartment that resulted in a couple of broken ribs, and it was discovered that he was suffering from kidney failure complicated by his diabetes. He died in February 1999 while under hospice care at a Detroit hospital, and his remains were cremated.

Although his prints have been included in group exhibitions and physique photography retrospectives, no solo exhibition of the work of Douglas of Detroit has yet been mounted.

Janssen, Volker. Douglas of Detroit, Vol. IV in the series American Photography of the Male Nude 1940-1970. (Simon’s Town, Janssen Publishers CC, 1998)