Robert McCabe was born in Chicago in 1934 and grew up in Rye, New York. His father worked for a picture newspaper in New York City, and as a result of his father’s gift of a Kodak Baby Brownie in 1939, McCabe started taking photographs when he was five. His earliest quest was for newsworthy photographs, and he gathered images of hurricanes, drownings, and auto and train accidents. His interests shifted to people, still life, and landscapes during three years in western Massachusetts where little of dramatic interest occurred.

His first photographs of Europe were the result of a trip in 1954 to France, Italy, and Greece while an undergraduate at Princeton. He returned to Greece in 1955 and again in 1957 and traveled extensively in the Aegean, shooting with a Rolleiflex and Plus-X film. In 1957 he took a series of color photographs in the Greek Islands at the request of the National Geographic Society.
 

His black and white photos were first exhibited in 1954 and 1955 at Firestone Library at Princeton, and in a traveling exhibition which ensued. During this period, he also appeared on television with Ambassador George Melas giving a photographic tour of Greece. In 1967 a selection of photographs was exhibited at the Olympic Gallery (now Olympic Tower) in New York City under the auspices of Spyros Skouras. The publication of his first book, Metamorphosis, was in 1979. Since then, he has published more than 20 books and catalogs.
 

His bestselling book, Greece: Images of an Enchanted Land 1954-1965 was published in 2004 by Quantuck Lane Press in the U.S. and by Patakis Editions in Greece. Since then he has published over 20 books and is currently working on several more.
 

Mr. McCabe's work has been exhibited internationally including shows in London, Paris, Brussels, The Hague, Budapest, Seoul, Tokyo and Istanbul.  Within Greece, his photographs have been displayed at several Athens locations including the Acropolis Museum, the Cycladic Museum and the Benaki Museum, as well as at locations in Patmos, Mykonos, Santorini, Thessaloniki, Monodendri, Delphi, Patras, Corfu, Amorgos, Serifos, and Poros. He has also exhibited in the United States in New York City, Boston, and Jackson Hole, WY.