About This Stamp
The United States Postal Service celebrates the timeless beauty of angel’s trumpets with these new four-cent definitive stamps. With their large trumpet-shaped blossoms and distinctive sweet smell, angel’s trumpets are a summer favorite.
To create the image, photographer Harold Davis backlit the flowers on a light box and combined multiple photographic exposures, resulting in a luminous, transparent look. He also scanned a sheet of aged paper and, in post-production, added the scan as a background to the floral image.
“The point of this technique is to create a partially transparent effect using the colors that are passed through flower petals, rather than reflected by the petals, as is the case for most conventional flower photography,” Davis says.
Davis organized the flowers and leaves such that the four “trumpets” are seen pointing upward, not hanging down as they would be in nature. He says the arrangement was chosen after trying numerous arrangements and discovering that photographing them with the flowers facing down didn’t work visually. But the name of the plant inspired a solution.
“It occurred to me that the common name for Brugmansia included the word trumpet — that they looked like trumpets, and that I could emphasize this correspondence in how I set the image up,” Davis says.
While Davis does grow angel’s trumpets in his backyard, he found these flowers in his Berkeley, California, neighborhood. He says he has long been fascinated by angel’s trumpets and their “incredibly beautiful and large blossoms” and “unique shape.”
The 4¢ Angel’s Trumpet stamp follows the 2024 release of other low-denomination flower stamps — the 1¢ Fringed Tulip, 2¢ Daffodils, 3¢ Peonies, 5¢ Red Tulips, and 10¢ Poppies and Coneflowers.
“In the right climate and location, this is an extremely vigorous grower with spectacular flowers that no longer exist in the wild, so it is a very special plant to cultivate,” Davis says.
Art director Ethel Kessler designed the stamp with an existing image by Harold Davis.
Stamp Art Director, Stamp Designer
Ethel Kessler
Ethel Kessler is an award-winning designer and art director who has worked with corporations, museums, public and private institutions, professional service organizations, and now, the United States Postal Service.
After earning a B.F.A. in visual communications from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Kessler worked as a graphic designer and project manager for the exhibits division of the United States Information Agency. Her work was distributed internationally on subjects such as Immigration, Entrepreneurship, Renovation of American Cities, and the Bicentennial of 1976. She was also responsible for exhibits in Morocco, Botswana, and El Salvador.
In 1981, she established Kessler Design, Inc., for which she is creative director and designer. Clients have included the Clinton Government reorganization, the Smithsonian Institution, National Geographic Television, the National Park Service, and the American Institute of Architects.
She has been an art director for the U.S. Postal Service’s stamp development program for more than 25 years. As an art director for USPS, Kessler has been responsible for creating more than 500 stamp designs, including the Breast Cancer Research stamp illustrated by Whitney Sherman. Issued in 1998, the stamp is still on sale and has raised more $98 million for breast cancer research. Other Kessler projects include the popular and highly regarded Nature of America 120 stamp series, a collaboration with nationally acclaimed nature illustrator John Dawson, the 12-year Lunar New Year series with Kam Mak, the American Filmmaking: Behind the Scenes 10 stamps issued in 2003, a 2016 pane of stamps celebrating the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service, and the 2023 stamp honoring Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And many, many others.
Existing Photo by
Harold Davis
Harold Davis is an internationally known digital artist and award-winning professional photographer. He is the author of several bestselling photography books, including Creative Garden Photography, The Photographer's Black & White Handbook, and Photographing Flowers.
Discovering his love for photography at an early age, Davis later studied figurative and abstract painting at the Art Students League, Bennington College, and elsewhere. After graduating from Rutgers Law School, he opened a photography studio in New York City and exhibited his work widely. Supporting himself largely with commercial photography assignments, Davis found himself crossing the Brooks Range in Northern Alaska on foot, documenting the environmental disaster at Love Canal, and capturing the view above the World Trade Center by hanging out the door of a helicopter by a strap. During the 1980s, Davis was the creator of a line of bestselling fine-art graphics and was founder and chief photographer of the Wilderness Studio line of greeting cards and posters.
After embarking on a career in the technology industry in the early 1990s, Davis returned to photography and painting in 2004. Combining innovative digital painting and digital photography techniques, many of them of his own invention, he now experiments with cutting-edge photographic technologies to create work that also evokes historic artistic traditions, including Impressionist painting, Asian art, and aspects of surrealism.
When not traveling in search of photographic adventures or leading photography workshops, Davis can be found at home in his flower garden in Berkeley, California, with his wife Phyllis and their four children.
Two existing photographs by Davis appeared on stamps issued in 2022: the Tulips Forever® stamp and the Sunflower Bouquet two-ounce stamp. His existing photography was featured on five stamps in 2024: 1¢ Fringed Tulip, 2¢ Daffodils, 3¢ Peonies, 5¢ Red Tulips, and 10¢ Poppies and Coneflowers, and in 2026 on 4¢ Angel's Trumpets.
