ALASKA—It started with a casual call from Tasmania, Australia; a curious widow wanted to share copies of her late husband’s work from a brief time spent in southeast Alaska in the mid-80s. That work included photos of lumber yards and timber harvesting, rock rubbings of petroglyphs and other memorabilia from Alaska’s national forests.

Jim Osborn collected the items 40 years ago as a special project for the Forest Service. His wife, Susan, reached out to entities in Alaska to gauge interest in the late Mr. Osborn’s collection for a possible donation. 

Jim Osborn spent two months as a volunteer supporting an Alaska-based visual project in 1986. He worked for Carl Holguin, a creative arts group leader in the Alaska regional office. The project took Osborn to Ketchikan, Sitka, Wrangell and Juneau on the Tongass and various locations on the Chugach. He took more than a thousand photos and collected rock rubbings along the way. Now retired, Holguin happily reminisced about the project he helped manage four decades earlier. 

“Back then, the forests were often so busy, it was difficult to find time to take photos,” said Holguin. “Jim provided the region with a cornucopia of professional-grade photographs that we used for years. All it cost was 40 rolls of film, temporary housing and a stipend.”

A photo shot list was created based on regional, forest and ranger district needs. The visuals were used for brochures, environmental documents, media releases and interpretive programs.

Osborn worked diligently to capture the shots, documenting scenery, wildlife and fish and the cities, towns and villages of southeast Alaska. The focus was primarily on the people and communities in and around the national forests.

Holguin described the photographs as a snapshot of life in Alaska before cell phones, digital photography, the internet and social media. “Jim periodically came to the Juneau office with his exposed film rolls,” Holguin recalled. “We’d have them developed, and then sit down to review them, pick out the most appealing ones, and see if any photos still needed to be taken.”

Susan Osborn traveled to Juneau in June 2023 on a family cruise ship vacation and met with Forest Service staff, who collected the items. Thanks to a prearranged dockside meetup, Osborn met the staff with a huge smile, cradling a large box and mailing tube.

“After Jim's passing in 2016, I decided that these great items were not serving anybody and should go back to Alaska,” said Susan Osborn. “So, when an opportunity arose to join a June southeast Alaska cruise, I felt the timing was perfect—meant to be.” 

In addition to photos, the Osborn donation also included rock rubbings, a favorite of Regional Heritage Program Leader Keri Hicks. When approached in May about these items, Hicks asked for images first. 

“From the photos it looks like Jim laid a large piece of paper on top of the petroglyphs, which are designs pecked or ground into stone. He rubbed the paper with charcoal or some other medium to transfer the image to the paper,” Hicks said. “This is a way to document the design, but this method is no longer encouraged due to the possibility of eventually harming the image. Photography is the best way to record rock art.” 
Hicks was open to accepting the rubbings if the agency could match them with corresponding petroglyphs on the ground. She would then add the images to the corresponding site record. 

“If we’re successful in identifying which petroglyphs were recorded by Jim, we’ll add the physical rubbings to the hard copy site records and digitize them,” Hicks explained. “If we’re not successful matching the rubbings to their corresponding petroglyphs we’ll eventually transfer them to the Federal Records Center. This is where they will be available to researchers in perpetuity.”

Hicks reported that people rarely take the time to seek out a public repository for collections they have in their personal possession. “When I saw the rubbings, I decided they needed a permanent home. Susan is exceedingly generous to bring them all the way from Australia back to southeast Alaska.” 

The Alaska Region plans to share the donated visuals with others by using them on a variety of products and platforms. This collection will enable the region to continue to tell the Alaska Region’s story—present and future—and thanks to folks like Susan and Jim Osborn, stories from the past as well. 

Jim Osborn was raised in Wichita, Kansas. He attended the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California, in the mid-1980s. Following his graduation from the institute, Osborn put his new photography skills to beneficial use when Holguin, who attended Brooks in the mid-70s, recruited him for the project in Alaska.

In 1994, the Osborns moved to Whitsundays, Queensland, Australia, and then headed down the east coast to Hobart, Tasmania, where they lived for more than 20 years.