VERONA, N.D. — For Katherine Plessner, photography is all about stopping and enjoying a moment, even if that means going off schedule or taking a detour.
Now, a moment during a winter drive in Alaska is forever sealed as a United States Postal Service Forever Stamp.
Katherine Plessner, a retired farmer and lifelong photographer from Verona, N.D., is one of five photographers whose work is featured in the U.S. Postal Service’s Winter Landscape Forever Stamp series, which was released last fall. Her image of snow-coated evergreens is now printed for millions across the nation to see and mail along.
For Plessner, 74, the honor was never something she chased. Known locally and nationally for her landscape and rural photography, she has spent decades capturing barns, fence lines, livestock and her favorite: sunbursts.
“If you notice the sunburst behind the one tree, that’s kind of my specialty,” Plessner said. “I always look for sunbursts.”
Evergreens shrouded in snow, a photo taken by Katherine Plessner, is one of the five photos used for the Winter Landscapes U.S. Postal Forever Stamps. Plessner is from Verona, N.D., and took this picture on a photography trip to Alaska.
Contributed / Katherine Plessner
While she has traveled from neighboring countries to as far as Norway and Africa, some of her favorite images were taken nearby.
“My best Northern Light pictures have come from at home,” she said. “I’ve been to Iceland and Norway and Alaska, all of them looking for Northern Lights, but some of the best ones have been around here.”
Retired farmer, full-time fun
Plessner lives in Verona, N.D., a town of roughly 65 residents, where Plessner farmed with her husband, Kent; since 1972, they started dairy and grain farming along with some stock cattle.
Plessner also spent 20 years as a member of Pride of Dakota, selling her sewing and painting creations as “Katherine’s Krafts.” After her last craft show, Plessner took a two-week trip with her cousins to southeast Asia, a trip that kick-started her travel cravings. “That got me the travel bug,” she said.
Plessner and her husband retired after the harvest in fall 2022, making it easier for Plessner to travel, and she went on a handful of trips through a photography tour company.
“I’ve done a lot of tours with them and been to a lot of foreign countries,” she said. “They do tours, all based on photography. We get up early before sunrise and shoot all day, and go back to bed and do it again.”
With a focus on scenery, Plessner loves to photograph buildings and nature. Photos from home feature crops, barns, cattle and harvest or other work around the farm.
A photo taken by Katherine Plessner captures her husband harvesting on their farm in Verona, N.D., with her specialty of a sunburst on the horizon.
Contributed / Katherine Plessner
Plessner started photographing in high school. She tries to get her shots right in the camera to avoid any extensive editing — a habit from her film photography days.
“One of my feelings is that the photos end up being the byproduct,” she said. “It’s the people and the experiences that really make these photo trips special.”
While her husband likes to stay busy at home and isn’t one to join in on the photography trips, he does tend to work with Plessner to stop the car when she wants to take shots on the road.
On one occasion during a photography trip to West Virginia, the group traveled in two cars. One car wanted to head straight to breakfast, and the other car, with Plessner, saw a good opportunity for photographing old barns and landscapes while the sun was rising. Plessner and her car-mates skipped breakfast completely to continue shooting photos, indicating she was “in the right car.”
“I travel with some other women about my age, and we say our motto is ‘Adventure before dementia,’” Plessner said. “I’ve met fun people from all over the world.”
Contests, magazines and postal stamps
Over the years, she’s entered a handful of photo contests, winning several in different categories, including winning the North Dakota Governor’s contest for her picture of Teddy Roosevelt’s cabin in Medora; that photo now hangs in the visitor center and was even made into a magnet in the gift shop.
Katherine Plessner’s photograph of the Maltese Cross Cabin at the Theodore Roosevelt National Park in Medora, N.D., now hangs on the wall of the visitor center and was customized into a magnet for the gift shop.
Contributed / Katherine Plessner
Through her contest submissions and more than 3,000 uploaded pictures on
Plessner’s photos have been viewed by thousands and even published in several magazines and calendars.
She says her snow-covered evergreen image became a U.S. postage stamp by “accident” because she didn’t submit the photo herself. Taken in Alaska and published in Country magazine, the picture was spotted by someone from the U.S. Postal Service, who reached out to her expressing their interest in using it for a stamp.
After further discussion with the Postal Service, Plessner completed a nine-page contract back in 2022. It was a three-year process that she had to keep quiet, she said, but after all the waiting, the stamps went into production in September last year.
“I was just starting to wonder because I never hear anything and nothing was happening,” she said. “But last summer, I got a message saying you can start telling people about it, and they sent me some postcards with stamps on them.”
Her image was part of the
and sold as a book of 20 Forever Stamps.
One of the stamps in the U.S. Postal Service Winter Landscapes Collection features a photograph taken by Katherine Plessner from Verona, N.D.
Chris Flynn / The Forum
Although Plessner mentioned that she “never thought it was that great of a picture, but somebody liked it,” she did like the story behind the Alaskan photo.
“We were driving way up past the Arctic Circle, and we went by those trees that were covered with snow,” she said. “We stopped and took some pictures, and we went up, did our five-day thing shooting the Northern Lights in the snow and all this. But when we came back, all that snow was gone off those trees and had melted. We were lucky.”
As for future trips and possibly lucky shots, Plessner plans to continue taking photography tour trips, with two trips booked for next year already and even a trip booked for 2027.