Marjory Collins, 1912-1985

The daughter of Elizabeth Everts Paine and Frederick Lewis Collins, Marjory Collins was born on March 15, 1912. She spent her childhood in Scarsdale, New York, and in Europe. She attended Brearley School, Sweet Briar College, the University of Munich, and Antioch College West. Shortly after starting at Sweet Briar College, Collins married Yale student John "Jack" I. H. Baur (1909-1987) in 1931. The couple continued their education at the University of Munich during a year in Europe, before divorcing in 1935.

In 1935, Collins moved to Greenwich Village in New York City and studied photography with Ralph Steiner until 1940. During World War II, she worked for the Office of War Information as part of Roy Styker's documentary photography team. When the job ended in 1944, she moved to Alaska for a year, where she worked for a construction company and as a freelance photojournalist. She also married and divorced again. In 1945, she began traveling extensively, working on photographic assignments for United States government agencies and for commercial photo presses such as Black Star, the Associated Press, and Time, Inc., in Egypt, Ethiopia, Ireland, Italy, Italian Somaliland, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda. Between 1948-1950, Collins married for a third time, but that marriage also failed with her husband destroying many of her photographs and negatives.

...