The Osbornes Project
Series — described at inventory level
Series · inventory level
Western Oregon Osborne photographs, 1932–1940: panoramic photographs taken from 1930s fire lookouts, collected across four earlier ORWW projects (2004, 2006, 2007, 2010) and consolidated in 2020 by county, with Benton, Lane, Lincoln and Polk counties added. Used for repeat photography and forest-cover comparison.
What this is
In the 1930s the U.S. Forest Service equipped Oregon's fire lookouts with the Osborne photo-recording transit, a camera that swept a 120-degree panorama from a surveyed point. The negatives were made to help spotters locate smoke. Seventy years later they turned out to be something else: a dated, precisely located photograph of the forest as it stood before the century's changes in logging, fire suppression and settlement.
From the mid-2000s onward, Judd Lehman and Bob Zybach worked back to those points and photographed them again. Two panoramas from the same tripod position, seventy years apart, show what changed without anyone having to argue about it. This is the same evidentiary habit as the oral histories — go to the place, record what is there, date it — done with a camera.
Inventory
| What | Detail |
|---|---|
| Photographs | Panoramas made from western Oregon fire lookouts between 1932 and 1940. |
| The project | The project page names Judd Lehman and Bob Zybach and gives 2006 as its start. The creator's own project listing counts four earlier collections — 2004, 2006, 2007 and 2010 — consolidated by county in 2020, when Benton, Lane, Lincoln and Polk counties were added. Both accounts are recorded; they have not been reconciled. |
| Arrangement | An icon map plus a county index: Benton, Curry, Douglas, Jackson, Josephine, Klamath, Lincoln, Linn and Polk counties, with separate sub-sites for the Kalmiopsis Wilderness and for individual river basins. |
| Completed sets | Kalmiopsis Wilderness 2006; Linn County 2007; upper South Umpqua 2010; Elliott State Forest lookouts 2018. |
| Funding | Expansion funded in 2020 by the Starker family. |
| Background literature | The project's references cite Griffith 1945, Arnst 1985 and Petersen 1994 on the Osborne camera and the lookout system. |
| Companion project | A separate ORWW repeat-photography site collects the same method applied outside the lookout panoramas. |
| Accessioned | 7 files whose names match this series were accessioned in the 2026 upload. Described from: public ORWW project pages; no files accessioned in the 2026 upload. |
The originals
- The Osbornes Project — icon map and county index.
- Douglas County panoramas
- Osbornes Project references
- ORWW repeat photography
- The Osbornes Project — public guide page (2020) orww.store — the creator's own project and bookshop site, a different domain from his orww.org archive.
Known gaps
- The Library has not counted the panoramas. The public site organizes them by county page rather than as a list, and no image inventory has been made.
- Rights in the 1930s originals sit with the agencies that made them; the rephotographs are the project's. The two need separating before any image is republished rather than linked.
- The lookout points have surveyed coordinates in the original records. Those coordinates have not been extracted, and until they are, this series cannot be put on the collection's map.
Why this series stays at inventory level
The creator keeps the Osbornes work together with his wildfire and forest-restoration program, and that program lives on his own site, orww.org, not in this Library. So this series is described here and pointed to, not copied. If it were ever opened, the shape is simple — a page per lookout point with the historical panorama, the repeat, the two dates and the photographer; the work would be in the counting and the rights, not in the description.
Provenance
- Creators
- Judd Lehman and Dr. Bob Zybach; Oregon Websites and Watershed Project, Inc.
- Historical images
- U.S. Forest Service Osborne panoramas, 1930s
- Published at
- orww.org/Osbornes_Project/
- In this collection
- Inventory-level description only; no items published
- Rights
- Working edition. The creator publishes this material himself and retains all rights; the Library describes it with his participation and links to his originals. Per-series rights statements: /collections/zybach/rights/.
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