John Collier (anthropologist) - Career and Professional Development

Career and Professional Development

In the early 1930s he served as an informal guide to the photographer Paul Strand while Strand was in the Taos region but he continued to attempt a career in painting and writing through the mid-1930s. Only after a brief, unproductive enrollment at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), where he took more painting classes, did he turn to photography. He was largely self trained, except for some instruction in studio techniques from Sara Higgins Mack. In 1939, after working for a period in San Francisco, he opened a photographic studio in Taos, using what had been Paul Strand's darkroom and studio.

The studio was not successful financially but his photographic skill increased significantly and in 1940 he returned to San Francisco, where he worked both independently and for a number of commercial photographic studios. In 1941, probably through the influence of Dorothea Lange, some of his work from New Mexico came to the attention of Roy Emerson Stryker who hired him to work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) as a photographer. Collier's 1941 employment by the Farm Security Administration under Roy Emerson Stryker established his career in photography and he continued with the photographic unit when it was transferred to the Office of War Information (OWI). In mid 1943 he left the OWI and served in the Merchant Marine until late 1944, when Stryker hired him to work as a photographer for the Standard Oil Company in the Canadian Arctic and later in Latin America. While in Latin America in 1946, he took leave from Sryker's employment to collaborate with his wife, Mary E.T. Collier and with the Ecuadorian anthropologist Anibal Buitron on an ethnographic study of Otavalo, Ecuador.

After leaving Standard Oil at the end of 1946, Collier worked as a free lance photographer in New Mexico and New York. In 1950 he was hired by Alexander H. Leighton of Cornell University as part of a multi-disciplinary team investigation of community mental health in the Maritimes of Canada. Leighton challenged Collier to formalize methodologies for the use of photography in social science research. Collier's efforts in this arena were in fact a collaborative production with Mary E.T. Collier, without whom translation of Collier's insights and discoveries into standard academic language would have been impossible. The work with Leighton laid the intellectual foundation for the later development of the methodologies for visual anthropology for which Collier is known.

Collier later worked for Cornell in the Southwest and independently recorded the Cornell Vicos project in Peru during 1954 and 1955. He then free lanced out of New Mexico before moving to California in 1959, where he began a long career as a teacher at San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Art institute.

Collier acknowledged the abiding influence of both Roy Stryker and Alexander H. Leighton on his own work in visual anthropology. George Spindler, the founder of educational anthropology, chose Collier's book Visual Anthropology (discussed below) for early inclusion in his series of basic books in anthropology. Collier spent a great deal of his professional life giving workshops on the use of photography in visual anthropology, in speeches and professional presentations, as well as in more traditional forms of anthropological writing. Although widely recognized as a fine photographer, he major accomplishment was his contribution to and work in visual anthropology.