Robert A. McCabe

Robert McCabe was born in Chicago in 1934. Two years later, his father began working as an editor at the "New York Daily Mirror," prompting the family to move to the suburbs of New York. This newspaper was one of the first illustrated ones in New York, which sparked Robert's early interest in photography. At the age of four and a half, he was gifted a Kodak Baby Brownie, with which he sought out "events." He photographed hurricanes, bodies on the tracks, drownings, car accidents, and occasionally a celebrity or a wedding. Eventually, he settled on a medium-sized camera (and later a 35 mm), while his older brother used a 4"x 5" Speed Graphic—the standard reporter's camera of the time. The two shared a darkroom in their home's basement and sometimes collaborated with professional photographers from the "Mirror," doing reports from the so-called "radio cars." As he grew older, Robert began to move away from "news" and focused his interest on the composition of the image itself, whether it involved people, landscapes, or still lifes. He regularly followed the U.S. Camera Annual, which showcased the work of many of the era's greatest photographers. In the summer of 1954, at the age of 21, he came to Greece with his older brother, who had been invited for two weeks by his fellow student Petros Nomikos. Naturally—for those familiar with Greece of that era—the two brothers stayed in Greece for the entire summer. In a Greece that was unfamiliar with tourism, Robert had the sense of discovering and documenting a way of life unknown to him, in an astonishingly beautiful corner of the world. During his initial visits, he took black-and-white photographs using Plus-X film and a Rolleiflex camera. He exhibited his 1954-1955 photographs at the Firestone Library at Princeton University. In 1957, he photographed the Cyclades in color film for the National Geographic Society, primarily using Kodachrome. In 2006, in China, he used a digital Panasonic Lumix. Robert McCabe's work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions in Greece, England, France, and the USA. His books include "Metamorphosis," "Greece 1954-1965," "Greece: The Years of Innocence (1954-1965)," "Three Days in Havana," "DeepFreeze! A Photographer's Antarctic Odyssey in the Year 1959," "On the Road to Greece," "Grece. Les annees d' innocence," and "The Ramble in Central Park," which won the ForeWord Book of the Year Award in the Nature category in 2011.