Windy Osborn is the photographer who shot the first cover of BMX Action magazine in December 1976 and went on to become head photographer for Wizard Publications across BMX Action, FREESTYLIN', and Homeboy from 1976 through 1991. She is the daughter of Bob Osborn, founder of BMX Action, and the sister of R.L. Osborn, freestyle pioneer and co-founder of the BMX Action Trick Team. She was first published in Elaine Holt's Bicycle Motocross News in 1974 as a high-school freshman. She was inducted into the USA BMX Hall of Fame in 2012 in the BMX Woman category — the first year the category existed.

Did Windy Osborn really shoot the cover of BMX Action's first issue?

Yes. The cover of BMX Action Issue 1, dated December 1976 / January 1977, is a panning shot of Brian Lewis racing at Corona Raceway. The credit reads 'Photo by Windy.' She was sixteen years old at the time. She also shot the covers of Issues 3, 4, and 6 in 1977, meaning four of BMX Action's first six covers carry her photo credit. Bob Osborn's own first-person account in the December 1986 BMX Action retrospective is the primary source on how it happened: he was running races at the Dominguez Park track in Redondo Beach, handed her a camera, taught her how to push the button and wind the film, and processed her first roll a day or two later. His words: 'From day number one, she was just an absolute natural photographer.'

How did Windy Osborn learn photography?

She learned on her father's Minolta 35mm SLR, in his home darkroom, as a teenager visiting on weekends after her parents divorced. Bob Osborn was a part-time firefighter, a dirt-bike fan, and a working photographer. He was the race starter at the Dominguez Park BMX track in Redondo Beach. Windy was thirteen when she shot her first roll. In her own words from a 2013 OiPolloi interview: 'He processed my first roll, shot at 13, and said that I had a good eye.' Her first published photograph was a black-and-white image of Thom Lund at Yarnell Street BMX track, 1974, which she submitted to Dirt Bike Magazine. By 1975 she was on staff at Bicycle Motocross News at age fourteen.

Is Windy Osborn in the BMX Hall of Fame?

Yes. Windy Osborn was inducted into the National BMX Hall of Fame on June 16, 2012, at the US Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California, in the BMX Woman category — a brand-new category created that year. Cheri Elliott introduced her at the ceremony. Her two sons, Jesse and Eli, were present. In 2013 she was named one of the 'Top 10 Most Influential BMX Photographers of All Time' by Dig BMX Magazine.

Is Windy Osborn still shooting today?

Yes. She lives in Oceanside, California, and re-entered photography in 2007 after a long break, transitioning from film to digital. Her current work focuses on botanicals, succulents, palms, pelicans, and beach scenes around the Carmel and Monterey coast. Fine-art canvases are sold through Carmel-area galleries — Homescapes Carmel, Carmel Bay Company, Carmel Valley Art Association, and Avant Garden and Home — and online through Fine Art America and Pixels. Her site is windyosborn.com. Haro Bikes also released a Windy Osborn Capsule Collection of T-shirts and tanks reimagining her freestyle archive.

Windy Osborn

A Legend Bike Co. industry history page. Primary sources: USA BMX Hall of Fame entry 1124, the 23mag.com BMX Action and Bicycle Motocross News archives, Windy Osborn's own gallery site at windyosborn.com, and her first-person interviews with OiPolloi (2013), ActivLoop/Mpora, and Roman Candle Magazine. Cross-checked against oldschoolmags.com, Wikipedia, bmxmuseum.com, FatBMX, and the period BMX press.

"Photo by Windy" · head photographer for BMX Action, FREESTYLIN', and Homeboy · Wizard Publications, 1976-1991 · USA BMX Hall of Fame, 2012 (BMX Woman)

At a glance

Known as
"Windy" — the photo credit a generation of BMX kids hunted for the second they cracked open a new issue of BMX Action. First published at age fourteen. Sixteen years old when her photo ran on the cover of BMX Action Issue 1.

Known for
Cover photographer of BMX Action Issue 1, December 1976 — Brian Lewis at Corona Raceway, the photo widely considered the first cover photograph of any monthly BMX magazine · Head photographer at Wizard Publications from 1976 through 1991 · Shot for BMX Action, FREESTYLIN', and Homeboy · The only working female photographer in the BMX racing, freestyle, and skateboarding magazine industry during the late 1970s and 1980s · Defined the visual language of the BMX Action Trick Team era · Mentored a teenage Spike Jonze inside Wizard Publications · Daughter of Bob Osborn, founder of BMX Action · Sister of R.L. Osborn, freestyle pioneer and co-founder of the BMX Action Trick Team

Major honors
USA BMX Hall of Fame, 2012 (BMX Woman category — the first year the category existed) · Inducted June 16, 2012, at the US Olympic Training Center, Chula Vista, California · Dig BMX Magazine, "Top 10 Most Influential BMX Photographers of All Time" · Haro Bikes Windy Osborn Capsule Collection (2021/22) reissuing her freestyle photos on apparel

Hometown
Grew up between her mother's house and her father's place near Redondo Beach, California, after her parents divorced in the late 1960s. Lives today in Oceanside, California. Sells fine-art prints through Carmel-area galleries on the central California coast.

Windy Osborn is the person most BMX kids of a certain age looked at first. Not by name, not always — but in the photographs. The way a frame caught the light at Corona. The way Brian Lewis hung in the air over a roller. The way R.L. and Mike Buff stood next to a quarterpipe in the parking lot of a junior high school. The fish-eye crowd at a Velodrome contest. Martin Aparijo against the Venice Beach sky, shot from the ground with a 17mm lens. Those images live in the heads of riders and parents and shop owners three and four decades after the magazines stopped shipping. She took them. She was the one closing one eye behind the viewfinder while the sport built itself around her.

Before the magazine — Redondo Beach, Dominguez Park, and a Minolta SLR

Windy's parents separated in the late 1960s. She and her younger brother Robert — R.L. — visited their father on weekends. Bob Osborn was a working firefighter at the time. He raced dirt bikes. He kept a home darkroom in the house. He built cabinets. He grew bonsai trees. He took his kids out to Indian Dunes to watch motocross, and later, as the new sport of BMX took hold in Southern California, he started running the races at Dominguez Park in Redondo Beach himself.

R.L. was the one with race plates on his bike. Windy was the one standing next to her father at the starting gate with nothing in her hands. One day, somewhere in the run-up to the magazine, Bob handed her his Minolta 35mm SLR and pointed her at the track. His own version of that moment, from the December 1986 BMX Action 10th-anniversary retrospective, reproduced in the 23mag archive: "I asked Windy, 'Why don't you take a couple of pictures?' I told her about one or two things — how to push the button, how to wind it, how to take a light reading and match the needles up, and how to lead the guy if they're moving just go take some pictures. I figured that'll get her off my back for a while ... give her something to do. A day or two later, I processed the negatives, and ran proof sheets on 'em, and the darn things were great! I couldn't believe it, I mean they were GREAT! They were probably every bit as good as mine, and I'd been working like night and day for two years, studying everything I could get ahold of. From day number one, she was just an absolute natural photographer."

She was thirteen. Within a year she was on staff at Elaine Holt's Bicycle Motocross News, the first BMX newspaper in print, working for the woman the USA BMX Hall of Fame would later induct in her own right as one of the sport's pioneers. The earliest Windy Osborn credit I can find in the 23mag.com BMN archive sits on page 21 of the January 1975 issue. She had just turned fourteen. Her first published photograph, by her own account in interviews with OiPolloi and ActivLoop, was a black-and-white image of Thom Lund at the Yarnell Street BMX track in 1974, which she submitted to Dirt Bike Magazine and which they ran. "This is where it all started," she said in 2014. "I just kept going."

December 1976 — the Brian Lewis cover

The first issue of BMX Action was dated December 1976 / January 1977. Forty-eight pages. One-dollar cover price. Ten thousand copies. Her father financed it with $30,000 borrowed against the family house plus a loan from his sister and a third investor. The cover photograph is Brian Lewis at Corona Raceway, captured mid-race — a panning shot at roughly 1/60th of a second, the rider sharp against the soft horizontal blur of a track he is moving across.

The credit reads "Photo by Windy." She was sixteen.

Fifty years later, that is the single most cited image in BMX magazine history. Every retrospective of BMX Action opens with it. Every panel discussion on the early days of the press comes back to it. The cover of Issue 1, shot by the publisher's teenage daughter, is the visual cornerstone of the entire BMX print era. Bicycle Motocross News had come first as a newspaper. Super BMX came later that year. But the December 1976 BMX Action cover is the photograph BMX as a sport pins on the wall when it wants to point at where the modern publishing era began.

She did not stop at Issue 1. The 23mag.com BMX Action 1976-1977 issue index credits her with the cover of Issue 3, June 1977 (Bobby Encinas), Issue 4, August 1977 (Neil Bonds on Mongoose and Jeff Bottema on DG at the Speedo Grand Prix), and Issue 6, December 1977 (Brent Patterson at the Skyway / NBA Springnationals). Four of the magazine's first six covers were her photos. The visual identity of BMX Action in its founding year was, to a degree most readers never thought about, Windy's.

The only woman in the room

It is worth pausing on what she was up against. The BMX magazine industry of the late 1970s and 1980s was not a place for women. There were no women editors at the racing titles. There were no women on the test rider rosters. The cover models were boys with race plates on the front of their bikes. The audience was boys reading magazines about boys riding bikes. The advertising clients were companies founded and run by men. Inside that world, Windy Osborn was the only working female magazine photographer on the racing side, on the freestyle side, and on the skateboarding side. Her own bio puts it directly: "the only professional female photographer in the industry of bicycle motocross, freestyle and skateboarding."

She did not write about it at the time. She just kept shooting. The credit line did the work. Year after year, "Photo by Windy" ran under cover after cover and spread after spread, and the kids reading the magazine grew up understanding, without anyone needing to explain it, that the visual record of their sport was being kept by a woman with a camera around her neck and a darkroom waiting for her at home.

Wizard Publications — 1976 to 1991

The company her father built around the first issue of BMX Action became Wizard Publications, Inc., headquartered eventually at 3162 Kashiwa Street in Torrance, California. Windy was on the masthead from the start and stayed on it for fifteen years. By 1985, in her own words from her ActivLoop interview, "we had five magazines under our publishing company, Wizard Publications Inc, and had become a $10 million per year business. I was head photographer of three of those titles — BMXA, freestyle title Freestylin', and youth lifestyle mag, Homeboy."

FREESTYLIN' launched in Summer 1984. The cover of issue one is Ron Wilkerson. By that point the BMX Action Trick Team, co-founded by her brother R.L. with Mike Buff in 1981, had been touring for three years. Freestyle had outgrown its sidebar status inside BMX Action and needed its own publication. Windy moved with the discipline. The photo language of the freestyle era — close-in, low to the ground, fish-eye on the takeoff, motion blur where it added something rather than where it hid a missed exposure — is her language. A 1986 photograph of Martin Aparijo at Venice Beach, shot with a 17mm lens from a position on the asphalt, is the image she still gets asked about forty years later. The 1985 cover of BMX Action featuring her brother R.L. on a bike test is the one she has called her favorite subject in print.

She also took the time to bring younger people in. The director Spike Jonze, before he was a director, was a teenager working at Wizard Publications. Windy mentored him on the photo side. The masthead at BMX Action in the mid-1980s lists Spike Jonze as a contributor. He went on to shoot for FREESTYLIN', then for skateboarding titles, then for music videos, then to direct feature films. His path through photography and into film starts at Wizard. He learned part of it from Windy.

Steve Emig, who worked at Wizard from August through December 1986 and has written firsthand about the building, the staff, and the way the place operated, wrote a 2019 blog post titled "What I learned from Windy Osborn." Emig was a flatland pro at the time. He describes driving Windy to photo shoots as a young guy and learning, by watching her work, what a professional creative artist looks like when she shows up to the job — collaborative with the riders, patient with the conditions, decisive about the image. The Wizard staff, by every firsthand account, treated her as one of the senior people in the building. She was.

The 1989 Oklahoma Grands — the last BMX photograph

Her last BMX shoot, by her own account, was the 1989 Grand Nationals in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The final standalone issue of BMX Action was September 1989. Her father merged BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' into GO: The Rider's Manual that November. Bill Ryan, the founder of Supercross BMX, was the workshop columnist at GO during its run. The industry was contracting. The Wizard titles were folding into each other. Windy was raising a young family. She closed the camera bag.

She stayed off the photography circuit for the better part of two decades after that. Wizard wound down in the early 1990s. The BMX press lost its center of gravity. The riders she had photographed grew up, built brands of their own, in some cases retired, in some cases got inducted into halls of fame. The Windy Osborn negatives kept doing the work she had stopped doing — illustrating retrospectives, getting reprinted in Dig BMX Magazine, hanging in tribute exhibitions, getting tattooed on the arms of people who had seen her photos at the age of twelve and never forgotten them.

2007 — back behind the camera, in color, on the coast

In 2007 she picked it back up. Different subject. Different format. Her own description, on her gallery site: "Windy re-entered the world of photography, transitioning from film to digital, and with a new subject-love for botanicals." Since 2008, her fine-art canvas prints have hung in Carmel-area galleries — Homescapes Carmel, Carmel Bay Company, Carmel Valley Art Association, and Avant Garden and Home. Succulents, palms, pelicans, flowers, beach scenes shot on the central California coast. She sells them through her own site at windyosborn.com, through Fine Art America, and through Pixels. The same instinct for composition, the same patience with light, the same close-in framing — but with a quieter subject.

The BMX archive has not gone quiet, though. Haro Bikes released the Windy Osborn Capsule Collection of shirts and tanks in 2021, reissuing her freestyle photographs as graphic apparel — the "Stubbleduck" shirt, the "Tuck," the "Slide," each one built around a specific frame from her negatives. Bob Haro's design store carries a separate collection of fine-art prints from her files. The 2012 USA BMX Hall of Fame induction sealed the formal recognition. The newer collaborations make sure the photos themselves stay in circulation in front of riders who were not born when she shot them.

June 16, 2012 — USA BMX Hall of Fame, BMX Woman

The 28th Annual National BMX Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony was held at the United States Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California, on June 16, 2012. It was the first ceremony to honor BMX Women as a category. Cheri Elliott — Hall of Famer, multi-time #1 Pro, and one of the women Windy had photographed throughout the 1980s — introduced her on stage. Her two sons, Jesse and Eli, were in the audience. The bio that USA BMX published on her induction page (number 1124, still live today) is worth quoting in full, because it is the official record:

"'Photo By Windy' was the line that a generation of BMXers would look for upon cracking open the newest issue of BMX Action magazine. For many, she was the BMXA reader's first crush. And for everyone else, she was our visual link to all the action that was happening at the tracks and secret riding spots, far, far away from wherever we, the readers, happened to be. First published in Hall Of Famer Elaine Holt's 'BMX News' newspaper in 1974 (as a high school freshman), Windy helped define the sport of BMX through her viewfinder for nearly 20 years, in BMX Action, Freestylin' and GO magazines."

The other 2012 inductees in their respective categories: John Palfreyman Jr. (Pioneer), Eric Carter (Racer), Mat Hoffman (Freestyler), Steve Johnson of Torker (Industry), and the 2008 USA Olympic BMX Team (Special Recognition). It is the right room to sit in.

What Windy Osborn built

Windy did not start a brand. She did not design a frame. She did not win a national title. What she did, like her father did on the publishing side, is harder to point at: she built the visual memory of a sport while the sport was still figuring out it was a sport. Every BMX kid who ever taped a magazine page to the inside of his bedroom door, every rider who ever cut a photograph out of BMX Action to put in his school binder, every shop that ever pinned a freestyle shot on the wall behind the cash register — they all had Windy Osborn photographs in their lives without necessarily knowing the name attached to them.

The byline is its own quiet credential. Boys who learned BMX through Wizard's magazines learned it through the eye of a woman with a Minolta in her hand. Riders who became pros saw themselves photographed for the first time by her. Brands that built their identities on advertising in BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' built them on her frames. The "first crush" line in the USA BMX Hall of Fame bio is gentle and a little funny, but the part underneath it — "our visual link to all the action that was happening at the tracks and secret riding spots, far, far away from wherever we, the readers, happened to be" — is the real description of what she did.

The first cover photograph in BMX magazine history. The first great BMX photographer. The only working female photographer in the discipline through its full first generation. Fifteen years on the masthead of the bible of the sport. The visual record of the BMX Action Trick Team era. A second career on the central California coast. A Hall of Fame plaque hanging in the room where the sport keeps its names. That is what is here.

Sources

USA BMX Hall of Fame, official Windy Osborn entry — induction year 2012, BMX Woman category, biographical text including the "Photo By Windy" line and the 1974 Bicycle Motocross News start. https://www.usabmx.com/about/hall-of-fame/1124

USA BMX, "National BMX Hall of Fame 2012 Inductees Announced" — confirms the June 16, 2012 ceremony at the US Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California, and the full list of 2012 inductees. https://www.usabmx.com/news-and-media/General/2012-05-10/National-BMX-Hall-of-Fame-2012-Inductees-Announced?id=580

oldschoolmags.com — the curated PDF archive of BMX Action, BMX Plus!, Super BMX, FREESTYLIN', Homeboy, and GO. Primary source for issue dates, mastheads, cover photographers, and the December 1976 Issue One of BMX Action. https://oldschoolmags.com/ · BMX Action issue archive

23mag.com, BMX Action archive — full issue index of BMX Action from December 1976 through September 1989, with per-issue photographer credits. Confirms Windy on the covers of Issues 1, 3, 4, and 6 in 1976-1977. Also reproduces Bob Osborn's December 1986 first-person retrospective with the "From day number one, she was just an absolute natural photographer" quote in full. BMX Action master page · Issues 1-6 (Dec 1976 – Dec 1977)

23mag.com, Bicycle Motocross News archive — confirms Windy Osborn's earliest hard-verified published photo credit at page 21 of the January 1975 issue of BMN, age 14. Bicycle Motocross News 1974-1975 issue index

Windy Osborn Photography — her own bio and Hall of Fame pages, used for the verbatim Wizard Publications 1976-1991 statement, the BMX Action / FREESTYLIN' / Homeboy magazine list, the Dig BMX Top 10 honor, and the 2007 return-to-photography note. https://www.windyosborn.com/windy.html · https://www.windyosborn.com/national-bmx-hall-of-fame.html

ActivLoop / Mpora, "Shutter Life: BMX Photographer Windy Osborn's Life Behind the Lens" — long-form interview, primary source for the Minolta SLR, the Indian Dunes background, the 1974 Thom Lund / Yarnell Street first published photo, the "$10 million per year business" Wizard quote, the 1986 Martin Aparijo Venice Beach shoot detail, and her current Oceanside, California address. https://activloop.com/bmx/shutter-life-bmx-photographer-windy-osborns-life-behind-the-lens/

OiPolloi, "Interview: Windy Osborn, BMX Photographer" (2013) — primary source for the "shot at 13" detail, the early Bicycle Motocross News years, the Spike Jonze mentorship, the 1989 Oklahoma Grands as her last BMX shoot, and the "friendly rivalry" with her father for covers. https://www.oipolloi.com/blogs/the-blog/18182815-interview-windy-osborn-bmx-photographer

Roman Candle Magazine, "An Interview With Windy Osborn" (March 2020) — republication and expansion of period interview material. https://romancandlemagazine.com/2020/03/22/an-interview-with-windy-osborn/

Steve Emig, "What I learned from Windy Osborn" (2019) — coworker firsthand account from Emig's 1986 Wizard Publications tenure, used here for the working-photographer character note. http://steveemigthewhitebear.blogspot.com/2019/08/what-i-learned-from-windy-osborn.html · Companion post on the Wizard headquarters: 3162 Kashiwa Street in Torrance

Haro Bikes, "Windy Osborn Capsule Collection" — apparel line built around her freestyle photo archive, source for the modern industry recognition note. https://harobikes.com/collections/windy-osborn-capsule-collection · Bob Haro's print collection: https://bobharo.com/collections/windy-osborn-prints

Wikipedia entries on R.L. Osborn, BMX Action magazine, Wizard Publications, and the BMX Action Trick Team — supporting tier, cross-checked against the primary sources above. R.L. Osborn (Wikipedia)

Personal correspondence and direct knowledge of Bill Ryan (Supercross BMX, Torker Racing, Legend Bike Co.) — for the workshop-columnist context at GO magazine and the Pit / BMX Action Trick Team era seen up close.

Windy Osborn and Legend Bike Co.

Windy Osborn is on this site because Legend Bike Co.'s job is to keep the names of the people who built BMX in front of the riders coming up now. On the publishing side, more of those names sit inside her negatives than inside almost anyone else's. The riders on this site — R.L. Osborn, Bob Haro, Eddie Fiola, Martin Aparijo, Brent Patterson, Jeff Bottema, Stu Thomsen, Cheri Elliott, and dozens of others — were photographed by her over fifteen years across BMX Action, FREESTYLIN', and Homeboy. The brands on this site advertised in those magazines. The tracks on this site were photographed for those magazines.

Her father Bob Osborn built the publishing house. Her brother R.L. Osborn built the BMX Action Trick Team and Bully Bikes. Windy built the visual record. The three of them, working out of one family operation, gave the sport its public memory in print. Legend Bike Co. is trying to keep that memory readable in 2026 and forward.

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Windy Osborn

At a glance

Before the magazine — Redondo Beach, Dominguez Park, and a Minolta SLR

December 1976 — the Brian Lewis cover

The only woman in the room

Wizard Publications — 1976 to 1991

The 1989 Oklahoma Grands — the last BMX photograph

2007 — back behind the camera, in color, on the coast

June 16, 2012 — USA BMX Hall of Fame, BMX Woman

What Windy Osborn built

Sources

Windy Osborn and Legend Bike Co.

Read more on Legend Bike Co.

Country/region

Windy Osborn

At a glance

Before the magazine — Redondo Beach, Dominguez Park, and a Minolta SLR

December 1976 — the Brian Lewis cover

The only woman in the room

Wizard Publications — 1976 to 1991

The 1989 Oklahoma Grands — the last BMX photograph

2007 — back behind the camera, in color, on the coast

June 16, 2012 — USA BMX Hall of Fame, BMX Woman

What Windy Osborn built

Sources

Windy Osborn and Legend Bike Co.

Read more on Legend Bike Co.

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