Bliss is the name of the default computer wallpaper of
Windows XP, produced from the photograph of a landscape in Sonoma County,
California. The image contains rolling green hills and a blue sky with cumulus
and cirrus clouds. In the Dutch and Portuguese version of Windows XP, the
wallpaper is named Ireland and Alentejo, respectively, despite the image being
taken in California.
The photograph was taken by professional photographer Charles
O'Rear, a resident of St. Helena, Napa County, for digital-design company
HighTurn. According to O'Rear, the photograph was not digitally enhanced or
manipulated in any way.
O'Rear has also taken photographs for Bill Gates's stock
photography company Corbis and Napa Valley photographs for the May 1979
National Geographic article "Napa, Valley of the Vine". Although
O'Rear's focus was on photographing winemaking in the Napa Valley, the hill in
Bliss didn't have grapevines when the photograph was taken in 1996, five years
before the release of Windows XP. The photograph was taken on the side of the
highway 12/121[map 1] by a hand held medium-format camera. The approximate
location is 3101 Fremont Dr. (Sonoma Hwy.), Sonoma, CA. The coordinates for the
hill are 38.250124,-122.410817.
O'Rear's photograph inspired Windows XP's $200 million
advertising campaign "Yes you can", by the San Francisco division of
New York City advertising company McCann-Erickson. The campaign was launched on
television on ABC (America) during one of ABC Sports's Monday Night Football
games of the 2001 NFL season. The television commercials included Madonna's
"Ray of Light song, whose TV rights cost Microsoft about $14 million.
On November 27, 2006, artist collaboration Goldin+Senneby
visited the site in Sonoma Valley where the Bliss image was taken,
re-photographing the same view ten years later. It was now full of grapevines.
Their work After Microsoft was first shown in the exhibition "Paris was
Yesterday" at the gallery La Vitrine in April 2007. and has later been
exhibited at Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo,[citation needed] and 300m3 in
Gothenburg.
In May 2010, a Flickr user uploaded an image of the exact
same location, taken on May 2. The user, named Tony Immoos, said that the
re-taken photograph from 2006 "was taken from the wrong location,
approximately 350' farther Northeast", although it's the same hill.
In 2006, Sébastien Mettraux, a swiss artist made a photograph
titled "Bliss, after Bill Gates, 2006". Mettraux, who lives and works
near the Vallée de Joux, explained that it was taken in Les Esserts-de-Rives,
Switzerland. A local rumour said that the hill of the Windows XP wallpaper came
from this area in heart of the "watch valley". It is a mistake but
the photography shows that the hill is a lookalike. This photography has been
showed in the festival "Images'08" in Vevey .
