Iconic bison imagery last month began its journey beyond trailheads and park kiosks to be sold in the nearest post office. The newly debuted, double-sized U.S. postage stamp depicts a 19th-century bison skull superimposed over Tom Murphy’s photograph of a young bull bison surveying its surroundings in Yellowstone’s Hayden Valley circa 2005. The images fuse into a single frame much of what the renowned Livingston photographer spent decades documenting in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem: loss and resilience, history and the present, culture and biology.
“The skull is the story we inherited: exploitation, near‑extirpation,” Murphy told Mountain Journal, explaining that the stamp-within-a-stamp design positions his photo as an echo of the other bison, sourced from an engraving printed on the U.S. $10 bill in 1901 when the animal teetered on the brink of extinction. “The living animal is the work of recovery, but it’s also fragile and contested. Put them together and you get the conversation happening in the landscape.”
The stamp is already wildly popular — in Livingston alone, more than 10,000 sold in the first week. However, Yellowstone’s first officially licensed photo guide is hopeful that the conservation questions his stamp intends to conjure will reach those who don’t regularly frequent Yellowstone National Park or read scientific journals. “If I can make interesting and informed photographs of these creatures, then people will view them as interesting and beautiful and therefore worth saving,” he said. It’s that conviction — that aesthetic attention translates to stewardship — driving his work.
Based in Livingston since 1978, Murphy has made his camera a tool for both witnessing and witness‑bearing: chronicling grizzly recoveries, the wolf reintroduction, bison politics and the gradual creep of development and recreation around the park’s edges. His archive includes thousands of transparencies, slides, digital files and field notes that offer a visual companion to Yellowstone’s modern history. Over time, those images have moved beyond documentation into advocacy, shaping public debate and informing management decisions. “The camera doesn’t solve these things, but it can open a conversation,” Murphy told Mountain Journal.
“I think of myself as someone who’s paid attention long enough to see patterns,” he added. “A single image can tell a great story, but a sequence — years, decades — shows the arc. That’s where the power is for policy, and for people’s understanding.”
That long view is exactly what makes Murphy’s work distinctive. Early in his career, when film still dominated fieldwork, he learned to be patient with both light and behavior, to recognize not just the moment an animal looks toward the camera, but the narrative that surrounded that instant: the migration routes, the fences, the roadside pullouts where visitors linger and sometimes behave recklessly. As technology evolves with lighter bodies, better autofocus, high‑resolution sensors, and eventually drones and satellite imagery, so too has Murphy’s toolkit. But the ethical questions, he says, haven’t changed.
“The camera doesn’t solve these things, but it can open a conversation.”
Tom Murphy, wildlife and landscape photographer
“Technology can make us better observers,” Murphy said, “but it also makes it easier to intrude.” He speaks bluntly about drones and social media as both transformative and corrosive. Drones, when used responsibly, expand vantage points and allow non‑invasive surveying. But they’re also a temptation: images that dazzle on a feed can encourage risk‑taking in the field and increased human presence near animals. Social platforms have turned bystanders into photographers overnight; the result encourages swarms of people to chase the same shot and, at times, stress wildlife.
Park policies have tried to keep pace. Buffer zones, seasonal closures and educational campaigns have mitigated some problems, Murphy says, but enforcement is uneven and cultural change is slow. He remembers a time when the biggest threat to wildlife in Yellowstone was commercial hunting outside park boundaries; today it’s a mosaic of pressures: human‑wildlife conflict, vehicles, habitat fragmentation and the subtler effects of chronic disturbance. His images, accumulated over decades, trace these shifts.
One series he revisits often shows bison congregating near a road corridor over several seasons. The composition is simple: animals standing where they used to roam when they were less impacted by human infrastructure. The photographs, taken years apart, reveal evolutions of movement and feeding that can be linked to wintering areas increasingly bisected by development. “People look at one frame and call it a beautiful animal,” he said. “They don’t always see what’s behind that image: roads, fences, ranches and policies that push animals into new behaviors.”
Murphy, who mentors young photographers and still leads customized wilderness photography expeditions in Yellowstone, places a heavy emphasis on ethics and stewardship. He routinely weighs the public value of a picture against the potential cost to its subject, and shares with students those cases in which he chose not to publish imagery that could open up vulnerable animals to harassment.
“You go into this place with humility and respect,” Murphy said. “One sort of analogy I use is, ‘I’m going into their living room, so I need to behave myself.’” That same humility shapes how he moves in the field: slowly, observantly, deliberately. When the animals read him as non‑threatening, he says they better tolerate his presence, which is crucial if they’re to reveal behavior worth photographing. This is when he’s able to capture the coveted “big-story” wildlife photos — those featuring an animal “doing something interesting” and “in a nice landscape.”
“With wildlife photography, there’s a saying that even a blind chicken will find a piece of corn once in a while,” he said. “But you don’t get a body of work that’s consistently good unless you deeply know your subject.”
While Murphy guards his independence as an artist, he’s worked with researchers and conservation groups who monitor various populations and document the spread of invasive plants. In those partnerships, Murphy’s meticulously annotated archive has become data — a visual continuum complementing long‑term ecological studies tracking changes in elk migration and eroded riparian areas.
“In a sense, I’m trying to get people to hear the heartbeats of grizzly bears and bison because these animals belong there. They deserve their space — to be home without our interference. Just the same way I got to be.”
Tom murphy
A labor of both love and logistics, the act of curation is also its own form of storytelling. Selecting images for an exhibit, book or public campaign forces choices about emphasis: which narratives to elevate and which to leave in the dark. Murphy has learned to let the landscape and science guide those editorial decisions, favoring work that illuminates systemic issues over easy, single‑frame drama.
He sees his own role in the GYE as one component among interrelated communities wherein stories overlap — ranchers, park staff, scientists, outfitters and activists all have competing visions for the region’s future. In his images, animals are not only biological actors but also cultural touchstones: a buffalo becomes a symbol of indigenous history as well as one of modern wildlife policy. And the photographer tries to capture that nuance.
“I think whenever you can create art that drives home the truth that we are all vital aspects of nature,” he said. “Something clicks into place in terms of conservation and prioritizing biodiversity.”
His commitment is also visceral. Recounting a solo ski trip across Yellowstone National Park in 1985, Murphy describes a moment of silence so absolute he found himself scanning his snow-covered surroundings to uncover the source of an incessant thumping sound: “It was my own heart,” he told Mountain Journal, recalling what he says was a spiritual experience that’s embedded in him now. “It was so quiet after that period of time. My head had kind of cleared out, and I experienced a profound feeling of belonging there; my own rhythms uniform with what was going on around me.”
It’s that sense of belonging — the feeling of oneness with a living place — that Murphy tries to render palpable for viewers. “In a sense, I’m trying to get people to hear the heartbeats of grizzly bears and bison,” he said. “Because these animals belong there. They deserve their space — to be home without our interference. Just the same way I got to be.”
That impulse is evident in his outreach. Murphy gives talks at town halls, contributes images to science briefs, and offers photography workshops, passing on his belief that wilderness photographers have a duty not only to make beautiful work but to ensure that their images don’t become part of the problem — fueling voyeurism or encouraging irresponsible behavior.
“I want my pictures to be useful,” he said. “Useful to scientists, to managers and to the public. If a photograph can help someone see an issue in a new way, and then act, that’s the highest purpose for me.”
The new buffalo stamp will carry that hope into kitchens and post offices nationwide; ideally, prodding envelope-tearing Americans to consider bigger questions about stewardship between bills and greeting cards: What have we inherited? What have we restored? What do we still need to heal?
“You can make a good picture and hang it on a wall,” Murphy said. “But the real work is in what the picture does afterward. Does it make someone curious? Does it change a mind? Does it help an animal? That’s what keeps me out in the field, year after year.”
