Arizona man’s 30-year-old photo is now a US stamp

One Flagstaff photographer’s picture has been selected to be one of 16 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service.

“The photo shows an iceberg that was kind of drifting past our campsite right at sunset,” said freelance photographer Tom Bean who took the shot in July 1987. “An iceberg floating by in Glacier Bay is a strong image of that park, and it’s going on today. Icebergs are floating around. It’s sort of a scene that doesn’t change with time.”

The postal service reports they get about 40,000 stamp suggestions each year, and only about 20 topics make the cut. Bean’s photo certainly beat the odds.

“This photo came about because I was working on assignment for the National Geographic book division,” he said.

While on a kayak trip in the late ’80s, Bean took the photo at Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska where he was actually once the summer park ranger in the late ’70s.

“The assignment was to basically photograph the Inside Passage, which is the long waterway that extends from Seattle all the way up past Juno to Glacier Bay essentially,” he said.

The photo chosen for the stamp ended up not being used for the book, which meant it was returned to Bean to use as he saw fit.

Fast forward to present day, when Bean said he was contacted by the U.S. Postal Service because the picture was noticed on his website.

“I learned about it when actually a photo researcher that was doing some work for them (USPS) finding images from National Parks,” he said. “Then approached me and said, ‘What would you think about licensing this for a postage stamp?’…and I was pleased with the idea.”

Once a stamp collector as a child, Bean said he will surely be grabbing a few of these as keepsakes.

“It would be fun to be able to go out and buy a sheet of 16 of just this stamp but you can’t, so I probably won’t be buying so many that I can use them on my Christmas cards,” he joked. “I suppose all the photographers that are featured in this should get together and we could all go out buy sheets of stamps and then send them around to each other, so we’d all end up with lots of ours…and not the other guys’ stamps.”

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