[1][2][3] He briefly attended film school in San Francisco, but was otherwise self-taught in photography.
[3][5] McCabe's work encompasses a variety of subjects and topics, but he has largely concentrated on portraits of those in the arts.
[1] It was as a sports photographer that he was attending the 1985 European Cup Final between Liverpool and Juventus, but he ended up being a news photographer as he found himself taking the famous but tragic images of the Heysel Stadium disaster.
McCabe also photographed matches between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, Brendan Foster winning the 10,000-metre race at the 1978 AAA Championships in the rain, Li Zhenshi and his extremely high serve, and The Boat Race 1978 that saw the sinking of Cambridge's boat.
[4] McCabe later worked as the picture editor for Decade, Phaidon's photographic review of the first ten years of the new Millennium.