Photo Real

November 11, 2009 1:16 PM

The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr. at the University of New Mexico. "In 1941 to 1943, Collier worked as a photographer with the Farm Securities Administration and the Office of War Information under Roy Stryker and documented many areas around the eastern U.S and northern New Mexico." The full photoset is at flickr here.
posted by dersins (2 comments total)

Don't forget about the previously mentioned LOC duplication services for quality prints of any of the FSA photographers work.
posted by YoBananaBoy at 1:26 PM on November 11, 2009

"A founder of and one of the most significant contributors to the discipline of visual anthropology, John Collier Jr. applied still photography and film to cross-cultural understanding and analysis. He used photography for education in two ways. First, his principle work, Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method (with Malcolm Collier, 1986[1967]), defined the discipline for many years, and stimulated the creation of visual foci in anthropology departments nationally and internationally. Collier's second key work, Alaskan Eskimo Education: A Film Analysis of Cultural Confrontation in the Schools (1973), applied visual analysis to a critique of "white-centered" education in Native American schools. Collier showed that irrespective of lesson content, teaching styles were ineffective if they were insensitive to indigenous cultural modes of learning."

"Therein lies the significance of John Collier's contribution to anthropology and education — he brought a fresh set of lenses to examining human behavior and provided a framework and methodology for looking at the interaction of the components of a cultural system from a holistic, integrative perspective. It was Collier's specialty to be able to see the connections between the trees and the forest, to tease out, build upon, and bring to the attention of others the subtle, but often neglected human qualities that bind us together and give meaning to our everyday lives."

"Then I went down to Peru to record a possibly revolutionary awakening being attempted through applied anthropology. Hacienda Vicos was an extensive landholding in a high Andean valley with some two hundred peon families. Vicos was the property of a charitable organization, which over the years has leased it to commercial operators. Like many colonial haciendas in the Andes it faced an uncertain future, possibly bankruptcy. Cornell, in cooperation with San Marcos University in Lima and an agency of the Peruvian government, leased the hacienda with an innovative plan to improve conditions for the Indian peons living there. As director of the Cornell-Peru Project, Dr . Allan Holmberg, became the hacendado, the "lord of the manor," of Hacienda Vicos – and of the peons that came with it." – John Collier, Jr. "The Vicos Project," 1955
posted by netbros at 1:44 PM on November 11, 2009