From the Wilson Collier Committee:

John Collier, Jr. (1913-1992) was one of the leading photographers of the twentieth century. He captured on film images of people and places as far apart as the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories of Canada to the high Andes of Peru, of young and old people in hard times and in good.

Collier's hearing was impaired following an accident when he was young, an event that may have helped him develop skill in making vivid what the eye can see. He was aided in this by his wife Mary, herself a photographer, and by his son Malcolm, who followed in his footsteps.

John Collier came to Nova Scotia at the invitation of Dr. Alexander Leighton, whose long-standing love of this area led him to develop a proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation for creating a photographic record. The attendant grant made it possible for him to hire Collier to make such a record during 1950 and 1951. Collier was especially fascinated by the fishing industry and left for us historic images of men with lobster traps, of clam diggers with hacks and buckets, of men who hold the lines in their hands, of men who enter the weirs, and of men whose boats drag for scallops.

Titled 'Fishing Fundy Waters', this Exhibit gives the story of an evolving industry, an industry often as well known to the women who stayed at home as to the men who ventured out in all kinds of weather to reap the resources that have been a backbone and major source of livelihood to this area.