1987 Calendar ★ Recommended & Real

But one person did.

The calendars shipped in January 1987. Thousands of hardware stores from Maine to Oregon hung them on pegboards. People bought them for $1.99. Most never noticed the December photo—it was just a nice old picture. 1987 calendar

On December 15, 1987, a young woman walked into a hardware store in Bozeman, Montana. Her name was Maya. She was twenty-three, a photographer’s assistant, homesick for a place she’d never been. She glanced at the calendar on the counter, flipped to December, and gasped. The woman in the photo—the laughing woman with messy hair—was the exact image she’d been dreaming about for months, the face she’d been trying to capture in her own work: joy, unposed, real. But one person did

“Who took this?” she asked the clerk. People bought them for $1

He didn’t know it yet, but that calendar would change his life.