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| Windows XP Background, Bliss. Photo by Charles O'Rear. Used with permission from Microsoft. |
Napa Valley spent most of the 1990s trying desperately to curb the
spread of phylloxera, a microscopic pest that was devastating its grapes. By
the time the epidemic had run its course in 1999, some 50,000 acres of fields
had been decimated.
Although the cost for growers was astronomical—half a billion
dollars in total—the landscape of Northern California had never looked more
idyllic. Endless rows of grapevines had been replaced by a lush carpet of
grass, dotted here and there with wildflowers.
It was this vision of
Sonoma County that flashed by Charles O’Rear’s car window as he drove down
Highway 121 in 1998. Although he was a professional photographer, with work
featured in National Geographic and
the Los Angeles Times, O’Rear wasn’t on assignment that
Friday afternoon. Instead, he was headed to visit his then-girlfriend
(now-wife) near San Francisco.
But he still had one eye on
the region’s rolling hills. And then, he saw it. “My God!” he thought. “The grass is perfect!
It’s green! The sun is out, there are some clouds.’”
So he stopped his car, pulled out his medium-format camera, and
took a few photos using color Fujifilm. Those brilliant greens and pure blues
were totally unedited when O’Rear uploaded them to Corbis, a stock photo and
image licensing site founded by Bill Gates. A few years later, he got a call
from Microsoft asking to use his shot of Sonoma County as the default
background for its newest operating system.
O’Rear agreed to sell Microsoft all the rights to his photograph.
But when he tried to mail them the negatives, FedEx balked. Microsoft had
valued the image so highly that none of the shipping companies could cover the
insurance. In the end, O’Rear hopped on a plane to the company’s Seattle
headquarters to hand-deliver the photograph.
Although he signed a non-disclosure agreement that prevents him
from revealing the exact price, O’Rear has claimed it was the most he’s ever
been paid for an image—and the second-largest sum received by a living
photographer for a single photograph, topped only by an image of Bill Clinton
hugging Monica Lewinsky.
Microsoft dubbed it Bliss, and, since Windows XP was released in 2001, it
has been seen by at least a billion people.
“It’s interesting that people still remember the image,”
Goldin+Senneby said. “The whole idea of having one standardized image for every
desktop on more or less every computer in the world seems so old-fashioned
today. It’s from a time before the social web and its algorithmic
mass-customization.”
But even today, two years after Microsoft phased out the system,
seven percent of computers worldwide still run on XP. O’Rear said he has seen
his image everywhere from the White House situation room to a North Korean
power plant.
“Anywhere on this planet right now, if you stop somebody on the
street and you show somebody that photograph, they’re going to say ‘I’ve seen
that somewhere, I recognize that,’” he said. “I think it’s going to be around
forever.”
