Legacy
His theoretical and methodological contributions were many. While some visual anthropologists and semioticians, like Erving Goffman wanted to reject such forms of visual data as posed photographs, Collier cogently argued that all visual materials, snapshots of any kind, still reveal the something of the kinesthetics and the culture that produced them. So, an anthropologist might look at dozens of posed photographs to understand what constitutes "posing" in that time period and culture, as opposed to rejecting them. Collier also pioneered the use of the camera, in itself, as a method of entry into the field.
Collier died February 25, 1992 in San José, Costa Rica. Today, his photographs are archived at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque.
Read more about this topic: John Collier (anthropologist)
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“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)