Robert McCabe was born in Chicago in 1934 and grew up in the New York City area. His father worked for a picture newspaper in New York, and as the result of the gift of a Kodak Baby Brownie 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 he was an undergraduate at Princeton. He returned to Greece in 1955 and 1957 via freighter from the U.S. and traveled extensively in the Aegean, shooting with a Rolleiflex and Plus-X film. Since then he has released several books and exhibited his work in numerous exhibitions. In recent years his images have been displayed at the Art Association in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute in New York; The Hellenic Centre in London; and in Greece at exhibitions in Athens, Salonica, Patras, Santorini, Monodendri, Poros, Corfu, Patmos, and Anatolia College. In 2008, in the framework of Mois de la Photo, he exhibited a selection of photographs of Greece at Galerie Sit Down in Paris, France.

His bestselling book, Greece: Images of an Enchanted Land 1954-1965 was published by Quantuck Lane Press in the U.S. and by Patakis Editions in Greece. It is in its fourth printing. ·His photos of Greece have also appeared in numerous books by other authors.