Bliss. The most viewed photo ever.

The standard wallpaper of Windows XP is without a doubt the most distributed and most viewed photograph ever.

‘Bliss’, standaard achtergrond (‘wallpaper’) in Windows XP. Fotograaf: Charles O’Rear

The name of the photo is Bliss, however Dutch users of XP may have noticed that the wallpaper is called ‘Ierland’ in their version. Understandably we have therefore come to see this as a typical Irish landscape.

You have probably never given it a second thought, but this photo has a maker. His name is Charles O’Rear, an Irish name confirming our assumption the photo is taken in Ireland.

Charles O’Rear took this picture 1996 and sold it a couple of years later to Corbis, the stock photo company owned by Microsoft. I could not find out how much he was paid for it, but I doubt if it was more than a couple of hundred dollars. Too bad for him, because had he entered a royalty-deal of one 1 cent per sold XP-license, his bank account would now show a figure of at least 4 million dollar.

However. This photo was not taken in Ireland, but in Napa Valley, California, USA, not far from O’Rear’s residence. And indeed, as it now begins to dawn on us, ignorance is bliss, O’Rear is not an Irishman, O’Rear is a born American.

Once I found that out, I became curious about what we are really looking at in this picture and what they photographer had seen. My idyllic idea about this place was that he could have pointed his camera in any direction and still get the same picture. I have lived in the west of Ireland for two years myself and where I lived this actually was the case – except maybe for the fact that the skies were grey more often than blue.

But this illusion was shattered too. In the first place by the picture below, made by the artist collective Goldin+Senneby in January of 2006, form the exacgt same point of view as O’Rear. Not only the weather conditions were quite different from the original photo. The soil had been cutivated and was turned into a vineyard. Quite appropriate, considering that O’Rear made his living primarily out of photobooks on wine.

After Microsoft. De foto Bliss opnieuw gemaakt in 2006, door Goldin+Senneby

That left me with one question. How does the rest of the scenery in this place actually look? What do we see left and right of the photographer, and behind him?

Google Streetview brings us the answers. Below are four pictures taken by Nine Eyes, the camera on top of the Google cars that collect streetviews. This camera rises high above the care, giving a total different angle of the scenery in front of us. And the rest of the scenery is, well, less blissful than I thought it would be.

By the way, the coordinates of this place are 38.248966, -122.410269. In case you ant to have a look for yourself.