an important 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 (not to be confused with the anthropologist Malcolm Carr Collier, born 1908) also became an anthropologist who eventually collaborated with his father on a new edition of Visual Anthropology (1986). Other sons include Robin Collier, Vian Collier, and Aran Collier. 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). 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 the first academic work on Visual Anthropology. 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