Century-old cameras. Cutting-edge tech. Knoxville’s Bruce McCamish is proof that the best way forward in photography might be looking back.
By Susan Alexander Art by Bruce McCamish
Appeared in Cityview Magazine, Vol. 42, Issue 5 (September/October 2026)
Creatively, Bruce McCamish stands with both feet firmly planted in the past. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t also adapt to the future.
A native Knoxvillian and longtime professional real estate photographer, McCamish says he’s photographed more than 8,000 homes. (Some of those homes have been pictured in Cityview over the past 15 years.) “And they each have a story, and those stories touch me. But they don’t feed my passionate side because they don’t say anything about me.”
During the COVID pandemic, when real estate was keeping him (way too) busy, he started searching for what fed him creatively. He reverted from digital to film photography and began collecting cameras from 100-plus years ago. “That pushed my horizons past the comfort level.” He started shooting primarily in black and white and on various size films. He found a photographer with similar interests in Texas to develop his film. “What they produce is a cool, grainy, ethereal image unique to itself,” he says. “That’s what I love.”
Despite that love for the old way of working, McCamish also uses technology to digitize and reproduce his work, and he dabbles with AI to enhance some of his images. He understands the complexities it presents but says “every generation has had something new it’s fighting against.”
Long influenced by the work of the late Jim Thompson, McCamish was approached by Friends of the Smokies to reshoot about 150 images that Thompson took in the mountains 100 years ago. He’s both thrilled and challenged by the project that he expects will take up to two years to complete. “I’m buying the cameras that Thompson and Carlos Campbell and George Massa and Ansel Adams used. Some shoots will be roadside and some will be hiking. And that camera gear is heavy on a hike.”
McCamish says he spends at least one day a week in the Smokies with his cameras. “I have to go early or late when the crowds aren’t so bad, and sometimes I go when the weather’s bad. I like the moody skies.” A forestry major when he was a student at UT, he enjoys getting back to the environment he loves.
His photography career began around age 12 taking photos of birds in his family’s back yard in Chilhowee Hills. As he moved into shooting real estate, he sent his cameras into the air via helium balloon and 50-foot pole to gain fresh perspectives on often-seen subjects. “An elevated perspective makes people want to stop and look at an image,” he says. You can follow McCamish on Facebook and learn about occasional shows of his work there.
But he gives credit for his way of seeing things to spending summers on the Jamestown farm that belonged to his grandparents, Stella and Chester Looper. “When you look through a lens, you see the finite; you see the world through a tube. Growing up on the farm, I learned about the finite parts of nature, how one thing is tied to another. I saw the little things in life and saw the beauty in them.”
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