A total solar eclipse will cross Europe for the first time since 1999 on August 12, 2026. For eclipse chasers, there is a simple rule: totality or bust. A partial eclipse, even 99%, is not the event. The remaining sliver of direct sunlight is still overwhelmingly bright. The threshold between almost and actually is absolute.
Almost Bliss is made from that threshold.
I took this photograph on August 20, 2021 in the vineyards of Sant Martí Sarroca, Catalonia, 99.9% inside the eclipse’s path on August 12, 2026. Just outside the path of totality. Close enough to feel it. Not close enough to lose the sun.
The photograph rhymes deliberately with Charles O'Rear's Bliss (1996) --- the most viewed image in human history as the default desktop of Windows XP. Showing rolling green hills in Sonoma County, California, O'Rear shot it from the side of a highway on medium format film. Many photographers have made the pilgrimage to nearly recreate the iconic image, with the rolling hills having since become a vineyard. I had the chance to capture my bliss in Sant Martí Sarroca, Spain.
Rolling hills. Receding rows. Blue sky, puffy clouds. The grammar is the same. But terruño. Terracotta soil. Gnarled vines. A different country, a different century of farming. This landscape is always almost Bliss: close enough in visual language to invoke it, distinct enough to be somewhere else entirely.
Almost Bliss exists for the quarter-century anniversary of Windows XP, released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001. And on August 12, 2026, at 20:29 CEST, the moment of maximum eclipse obscuration at this location in Spain, it will also be almost dark. In Sant Martí Sarroca, the partial eclipse begins at 19:35 CEST, ending when the sun sets at 20:57 CEST.
The work is assembled from a library of 1,024 Geo-Surrealistic Landscapes, the same generative archive underlying my ongoing projects Who Made It? and Whose Future? CIE-Lab perceptual color matching reconstructs the vineyard photograph from landscape fragments. For now, the pixel reconstruction is brilliant and legible: a landscape that looks like a landscape.