5 Friends Celebrate 30 Years Of Taking The Exact Same Picture

There is a cabin near Copco Lake in California that contains seven framed photographs. Each one features the same five friends and was taken from the exact same angle. Some might call the pictures redundant or repetitive, but for John Wardlaw, John Dickson, Mark Rumer, Dallas Burney and John Molony, they are evidence of a bond that will never be broken.

All the way back in 1982, the five buddies, then around nineteen, went to stay at the Wardlaw family cabin. They fished, read, played jokes on each other and snapped a photograph sitting on a bench before leaving. You can take a look at it below, courtesy of CNN…



After their trip, the men went off to various colleges, but they each made it a point every summer to return to the lake house to catch up. Five years later, they thought it would be funny to recreate the same photograph they took as nineteen-year-olds. Five years after that, they did the same thing and vowed to continue doing so.

Earlier this summer, the guys met up for the thirtieth anniversary of the original picture, and they, of course, celebrated by taking another photo. You can check it out below…



Through weight gains, marriages, divorces and moves, Mark, Dallas and the three John’s have always made time for each other, and they’ve always made time for the picture. When one of them passes, hopefully decades from now, the rest plan to still meet up and still take their usual seats, the open space a tribute to their fallen brother. After they’re all gone, they’d like someone to take a picture of the empty bench and hang it beside the rest.

To check out every photo, you can head on over to a website the guys set up to document their experience.