A Photographer’s Picture of My Sunflower Farm Went Viral. Then a Corporation Stole It, and We Took Them to Court Together

The company settled in March, a week before trial.

Brooke received a licensing payment and damages large enough to buy a house. I received a payment for the use of my farm, and a contract to supply my own sunflowers to the company’s oil, at a price my accountant called “frankly ridiculous.”

I set up an LLC for the farm brand. “Nilsen Sunflower.” Brooke’s photo is on every bottle now. Legally.

But she’d gone back on the road. Canada. Alaska. A long assignment in Patagonia.

I didn’t hear from her for months.

In August, on an evening exactly two years after we’d met, I was driving home from the far field.

There was a car on the shoulder of my road.

A woman was standing in the ditch with a camera, shooting into the sunset over the sunflowers.

I stopped the truck.

“You okay?” I called, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

She turned around.

“I sold the van,” Brooke said. “I bought a little house in Jamestown last week. I figured if I’m going to spend my life taking pictures of farmland, I should live in the most beautiful farmland I’ve ever seen.”

“That’s the only reason?”

She put down the camera.

“No,” she said. “Can you stand in the field? Right there. The light’s perfect, and it needs a person.”

I walked into the sunflowers.

She walked in after me.

There’s a new photo now. It’s on our kitchen wall, not on any bottle. Two people standing in a sunflower field at sunset, holding each other, faces turned toward the sun.

Nobody but us has ever seen it.

Would you have given up life on the road for him? Tell me in the comments.