John Collier Jr.

His book, Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method (1967) is one of the earliest textbooks in the field. His photographs are archived at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

The recorded working language is English. Employment is recorded with San Francisco State University. Work by John Collier Jr. Is recorded in the collections of New Mexico Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Harry Ransom Center and Photography Collection. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship.

• Name — John Collier Jr. • Born — May 22, 1913 • Birthplace — Sparkill, New York • Died — February 25, 1992 • Place of death — San José, Costa Rica • Fields — Photography, Visual anthropology • Workplaces — Standard Oil Company Cornell University San Francisco State University • Footnotes — Collier's photographs are archived at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology.

John Collier Jr., born May 22, 1913, in Sparkill, New York, was the son of Lucy Wood Collier and sociologist John Collier. His father was the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs during the New Deal. John Jr. grew up largely in Taos, New Mexico, and the San Francisco Bay Area in California. While living in Mill Valley, California, he suffered injuries in a car accident at age 8 that resulted in major brain injuries, associated learning disabilities, and hearing loss that prevented him from successfully completing school beyond a third grade level, although he attended school sporadically into his teens. When it became evident that he could not perform in school, his family permitted to him spend considerable time living with family friends in the Taos Indian Pueblo. During the periods he was in California, he came under the influence of Leighton Robinson, a retired English master in sail, who provided him with seamanship training. He was also informally apprenticed to the Western painter, Maynard Dixon, who was then married to the photographer Dorothea Lange. He spent considerable time in the Dixon / Lange household in San Francisco during his early and mid teens and was trained in a wide range of painting techniques and skills. When in Taos he also received informal training from the artist Nicolai Fechin. This training largely ended in 1930 when he signed on as seaman in the four masted bark Abraham Rydberg for a voyage from San Francisco around Cape Horn to Dublin, Ireland, an experience arranged by Robinson. On his return, he continued to divide his time between Taos and the Bay Area, and in 1934 he established a home in Talpa, New Mexico, which would remain an anchor place throughout his life. In 1943, he married Mary Elizabeth Trumbull who became a long-term partner in his photographic and anthropological work. Their son Malcolm Collier also became an anthropologist who eventually collaborated with his father on a new edition of Visual Anthropology (1986). He had three other sons.

In the early 1930s, he served as an informal guide to the photographer Paul Strand while Strand was in the Taos region, and 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). Between the years 1941 and 1946 Collier Jr. made a series of photographic works of impressive narrative quality, depicting life in New England, in particular the lives of Portuguese immigrants living in the Massachusetts. The aesthetic and scientific value of this series of photographs from his fieldwork is later recognized as an early academic work on Visual Anthropology, following Margaret Mead’s and Gregory Bateson’s pioneering accomplishments. 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 freelance 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 whose 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. Collier later worked for Cornell in the Southwest and independently recorded the Cornell Vicos project in Peru during 1954 and 1955. He then freelanced 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's work in the field of visual anthropology was influenced by Roy Stryker and Alexander H. Leighton. 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, his major accomplishment was developing and documenting methodologies for visual anthropology.

Collier died on February 25, 1992, aged 78, while on vacation in San José, Costa Rica, of internal bleeding following surgery. At the time of his death, he had homes in Muir Beach, California, and Talpa, New Mexico.