The most viewed photograph in history turns 30. Here's how Bill Gates was involved

ABC Arts

Topic:Art History

Bill Gates and Microsoft set a computer desktop background that would become the most-viewed photograph in the world. (Supplied: Doug Wilson / Corbis via Getty Images)

Plastered across screens in offices, schools and homes globally, Bliss is one of the best-known images in the world.

Originally titled Bucolic Green Hills, the now iconic Windows desktop background was taken by former National Geographic photographer Charles O'Rear in a wine-growing region of California in January 1996, making it 30 years old this year.

The story of this ubiquitous image pops up occasionally on a click-baity website, usually with a headline declaring you "won't believe what the hill looks like today".

Before-and-after pictures contrast the well-known photograph's verdant pasture with the hill five, 10, 20 years on, now carpeted in rows of browning vines and a grey autumn sky.

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But far more has changed in the last 30 years than just the agricultural conditions of one hill in Sonoma County, California.

The desktop

When Microsoft Windows XP dropped in 2001, it unknowingly set the stage for one of the most influential — yet overlooked — spheres of design of our time.

Gone were the grey menu bars and janky pixel icons of the 1990s. XP thrust its users into the 21st century with an all-new blue interface with glossy gradients and subtle bevelling. And with its iconic wallpaper Bliss, Windows XP gave us a digital workspace with all the optimism of a clear sunny day in Teletubbyland.

Not many people know the Australian Open finalists are competing for a trophy based on an Ancient Roman artefact.

At least until we changed our wallpaper to a photo of our cat, dog, loving partner, or — in the case of your most annoying colleague — his fancy sports car.

It goes without saying that a computer has neither walls nor a desk. The term, introduced with the early days of personal computing in the 90s, helped consumers understand how the machines might be used and signalled the computer's growing status as an essential part of the modern office.

Before Windows XP, desktop backgrounds were neutral — often deliberately bland. But with the arrival of Bliss came an acknowledgement that the desktop had the power to reflect both brand identity and the very ethos of the technology itself.

Computing space race

Windows XP was possibly the last time Microsoft would lead the market in visionary aesthetic design.

When Apple firmly expanded onto the mass market in the mid-2000s, its offering to consumers was explicitly "cooler" than PCs.

At first, abstract colours and computer-generated graphics, but soon — with the arrival of OS 10.5 onwards — Mac computers DUNNNGed to life with starry galaxies and alchemistic visions of the northern lights.

Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs helped drive the brand as a lofty status symbol. (Getty Images: David Paul Morris)

The message was clear: Apple was the future. The landscape Mac users were operating in was beyond the terrestrial plain of Windows and its bucolic stock photo desktop backgrounds. Mac users were in outer space, surfing cosmic waves wearing a black turtleneck and a smug aura.

As Mac operating systems of this era (Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion) attested, Apple was the new predator on the market, and it would quickly devour a fearsome market share.

Back to Earth

By the mid-2010s, however, Apple OS began to change its tune, ditching the big cat names and astrological aesthetics in favour of sites of great natural beauty: Yosemite after the Yosemite National Park in California, El Capitan after the famous rock formation, and Sierra for the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range.

Screenshot of OS X Yosemite on version 10.10.5. (Supplied: Wikipedia)

Yosemite launched onto users' computer screens in 2014 with a striking photograph of the national park's iconic solid rock peak, Half Dome, in front of a pink and yellow sunset sky.

Apple had returned to the landscape; but unlike the comforting blue sky of Window's Bliss, these images were wild, uncontained and wondrous.

The sublime and the picturesque

The contrast between the rolling hills of Windows XP and Mac's desktop photographs of the 2010s can be described almost perfectly with two of art history's foundational theories: the picturesque and the sublime.

Coined in the 18th century, these terms are used to describe landscape paintings.

The "picturesque" describes the pleasing beauty of an ideal pastoral scene. This type of landscape sometimes contains people or farm animals, framed by perfectly placed trees or peppered with distant buildings. It is inviting, calming.

Landscape with a Wheatfield, about late 1650s–early 1660s, Jacob van Ruisdael, held at the J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. (Supplied: Getty Collection)

The rolling hills of Charles O'Rear's photograph Bliss embodied the picturesque for the 21st century: a digital landscape one could almost step into.

But just as a computer operating system is artificial, so, it seems, is a picturesque oil painting.

It may not look like it, but the picturesque scene is precisely controlled: influenced by the invention of landscape gardening, where 18th-century lords and ladies carved into the earth of their country estates to reshape them into more pleasing undulations, the picturesque landscape is shaped by the artist's hand and contained in the boundaries of the frame.

The sublime

The "sublime" on the other hand, describes a landscape that cannot be tamed. Wild and terrifying, the sublime scene inspires awe at the powers of nature.

Within sublime landscape paintings, humanity is reduced to insignificance. Tempestuous storms thrash overhead, and figures appear minuscule in comparison to mountains, valleys, rivers, and oceans.

The sublime was a cornerstone of the Romantic era, arising as a response to the Industrial Revolution. Writers, poets, and artists wanted to embrace the wonder of the natural world in a time when extractive and polluting industries were rapidly dominating it.

View of Yosemite Valley (1885) by Thomas Hill, Met Collection. (Supplied: Met Collection)

Two centuries later, the Mac desktops of the 2010s leveraged the sublime as a marketing strategy. The Apple universe, these images attested, was vast and user experience was transcendent.

Instead of going to work today to edit a CAD file for a cantankerous client, Apple would have you believe you were scaling the face of Yosemite's Half Dome. Instead of opening your emails you were tandem paragliding over the icy peaks of Sierra Nevada with Steve Jobs.

Were you logging off after eight hours of Excel, or were you watching the sunset in the Mojave Desert?

They moved fast, and things are now broken

There is, perhaps, a reason that the clickbait headlines showing the now brown and decaying landscape of Bliss strike a chord in our hearts.

Gone are the days of tech optimism, where personal devices were our gateways to the rest of the world, where computers and the internet felt like an infinite landscape of possibilities.

Today, connectivity is a prison, our devices are our wardens, and — worst of all — we have no choice but to pay for the privilege of our own confinement.

Apple has moved from images of the sublime to abstract forms and shapes. (Getty Images: Adam Gray/Bloomberg)

The sublime mountains and cliff faces of Mac OS once reflected the aspirations of the Apple user: those with the determination to scale the rock face without fear would, in the Apple universe, be rewarded for their entrepreneurial tenacity.

Today, Half Dome is cold and unfeeling, the Sierra mountain range is oppressive and the great sand dune of the Mojave desert feels like a wasteland of a post-tech-apocalypse world.

The picturesque Bliss, on the other hand, elicits a soft, nostalgic fondness. Its familiarity and blandness is a comforting reminder of a simpler time.

I for one, however, don't need to experience the picturesque or the sublime every time I open my computer — for now, I am happy with my desktop photo of my cat.

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