If you grew up in the early 2000s, there is an image burned so deeply into your brain that you could probably redraw it from memory right now. Rolling green hills. A blue sky. A handful of clouds doing exactly what clouds are supposed to do.
You stared at it every day in the school computer lab while waiting for Internet Explorer to load. You stared at it in the office. You stared at it at the hotel check-in desk. Over a billion people have seen it. It is the most viewed photograph in human history. And the man who took it was just trying to get to his girlfriend's house.
Few photos have the power to defy a generation, but one stands out above all others as the most viewed photo in the world
Image credits: reconrey / Reddit
The Windows XP screensaver was taken in the late 90s, and was quite an accidental shot
Chuck O'Rear was a National Geographic photographer, a man who had spent 25 years traveling the world capturing photographs. But on a January morning in 1996, he was not thinking about photography at all. He was driving from his home in St Helena, California, to visit his then-girlfriend Daphne Larkin in Marin County.
This was a drive he had made many times before, along what he describes as a winding little country road with scenery beautiful enough that he would regularly pull over just to take it in. He always carried a camera. "You never know," he has said. On this particular day, that instinct changed everything.
Image credits: Muthdra / Imgur
The photographer pulled over on a routine drive to his girlfriend's place, and thought the scenery looked too perfect not to capture
"There it was," he told Slate. The grass was green and perfect, the sun was out, and the clouds were doing exactly the right thing at exactly the right moment. O'Rear pulled over, set up his Mamiya RZ67 camera with color Fuji Film and a tripod, and worked quickly, because light like that does not last.
"By the time I parked, by the time I set my camera up, the clouds might have come in because everything changed so quickly," he recalled. He made a frame. He wound to the next one. And then he got back in his car and continued the drive to his girlfriend's house, completely unaware that he had just taken the most viewed photograph in human history.
Image credits: J L Sousa / Vida Press
Years later, Microsoft bought the photo agency that had the photo on file, and the photographer saw a sweet $100k payday
Image credits: Decoding the New Economy / YouTube
The original image was so valuable, the photographer had to hand-deliver it to Microsoft when no postal agency wanted to insure it
The photograph sat quietly in the archives of Westlight, the stock photo agency O'Rear had originally submitted it to, for the better part of two years. Then, in 1998, Bill Gates' media company Corbis bought Westlight, and suddenly, without any fanfare or negotiation, ‘Bliss’ was sitting in Microsoft's lap.
When the team was searching for a default wallpaper for the upcoming Windows XP operating system, the image was pulled from the Corbis library, and the rest, as they say, is history. Microsoft purchased it for a reported ‘low’ six-figure sum, believed to be somewhere north of $100,000, though the exact number has never been confirmed.
O'Rear still had the original film transparency, and Microsoft needed it. So they called around to courier and shipping companies to arrange delivery. Every single one of them refused. The photograph was simply too valuable to insure for standard shipping. Nobody would take the job. So Microsoft sent Chuck O'Rear a plane ticket and asked him to hand-deliver it himself. An easy job for a 6-figure pay day!
Image credits: cottonbro studio / Pexels (not the actual photo)
The photographer has a theory that anyone over the age of 15 will remember this photo for the rest of their lives
There is no escaping Bliss. O'Rear has traveled the world since its introduction to Windows, and the image has followed him everywhere. Old computers in hotel lobbies, billboards, airport terminals. "We were walking through the Chicago airport years ago, and there it was," he said. He even noticed it in images from the White House Situation Room and inside the Kremlin.
As for why Microsoft chose it in the first place, O'Rear has a theory. Computer screens in the early 2000s were not exactly known for their visual quality. ‘Bliss’, with its broad sweeping colors, its clean lines and its almost painterly simplicity, was perfectly engineered for exactly those limitations. "I think if I had shot it with 35 millimeter, it would not have nearly the same effect," O'Rear said.
Image credits: cottonbro studio / Reddit (not the actual photo)
The photograph was accidental, but so too was the scenery. Over 50,000 acres of farmland were destroyed by the microorganism phylloxera, turning Napa Valley into pastoral landscapes that seem to belong in rural Ireland.
Today, the hill is a little harder to spot. It is now covered again in vineyards for most of the year, and some trees have sprung up in the background, breaking the once clean curves of the hill. O'Reare also mentions that the road is incredibly busy now, with hardly any place to stop and patrol cars regularly passing by.
One thing is for sure: this image is burnt into all of our retinas. It sounds like the dial-up tone. It feels slightly warm from your Pentium III overheating. It smells like the rubber ball inside the computer mouse. It was a fleeting moment that defined a generation. Thanks for the memories, Chuck!
Which memories does this iconic image conjure up for you? Let's get nostalgic in the comments!
Watch the full interview here
People in the comments were still shook that this image was not photoshopped and simply captured nature at its finest
