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.

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.

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).

[4] 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.

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.

One example was an intensive documentation of the rural landscape, work and people of Digby County in Nova Scotia in support of one of Leighton's studies funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

[7] Generally recognized as the first published use of the term 'visual anthropology', this book and its second edition (co-authored with Malcolm Collier) have remained important references in the field.

As Edward T. Hall writes in the introduction to the later edition of the text, the two Colliers (John Jr. and Malcolm) almost singlehandedly established visual anthropology as an observational science in its own right.

[citation needed] In 1969, he turned to motion picture film to explore cultural conflicts in schools for Native students in Alaska as part of a major national study of American Indian Education.

[16] Collier died on February 25, 1992, aged 78, while on vacation in San José, Costa Rica, of internal bleeding following surgery.