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John Collier

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John Collier

American, (1913–1992)
John Collier Jr. was an American anthropologist and an early leader in the fields of visual anthropology and applied anthropology. His emphasis on analysis and use of still photographs in ethnography led him to significant contributions in other subfields of anthropology, especially the applied anthropology of education. His book, Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method (1967) is one of the earliest textbooks in the field and is still in use today. He was 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. 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.


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