John Collier

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. The work offered methods by which photographs may sensitize students to cross-cultural nuance and allow them to find correlations between visual behavior, material culture, and cultural and psychological values. 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.

http://online.sfsu.edu/biella/biella2002e.pdf