James Edward Westcott (January 20, 1922 – March 29, 2019) was an American photographer who was noted for his work with the United States government in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during the Manhattan Project and the Cold War.

His job for the Corps sent him around the region to create photographic documentation of several dams, a site in Tennessee that later became a prisoner-of-war camp, and the airport and other facilities at Fort Campbell on the Tennessee–Kentucky border.

In December 1942, the Army Corps transferred the 20-year-old Westcott to the Clinton Engineer Works at the then-secret Oak Ridge site.

[11] In June 1945, Westcott became an Army employee again, and in the post-war years he transitioned to employment with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) after its formation in 1946.

[2][10] During Westcott's 35-year professional career, his assignments included creating photographic documentation of many notable people, including Manhattan Project scientists J. Robert Oppenheimer, Arthur Compton, Glenn Seaborg, Vannevar Bush, Ernest O. Lawrence, and James Bryant Conant, U.S. Army Generals Leslie Groves, Maxwell Taylor and Kenneth Nichols, Admiral Hyman Rickover, Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson, U.S.

[1][10][12] Westcott's February 1946 photo portrait of Oppenheimer is highly regarded for depicting the Manhattan Project scientific director as a man weary from the tremendous weight of his experience.

Westcott then captured the image of the physicist sitting next to a fireplace mantel in the Oak Ridge Guest House holding the freshly lighted cigarette in his hand.

[13] In spite of the informality suggested by the cigarette, University of Tennessee photography professor Baldwin Lee points out that the photo was carefully planned and posed.

In 2005, the Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville mounted an exhibition of his photos, entitled "Through the Lens of Ed Westcott: A Photographic History of World War II's Secret City".

[16] A photograph of an Oak Ridge supermarket that Westcott created in 1945, "Tulip Town Market, Grove Centre", was featured by the National Archives as part of a 2005–2006 exhibit named "The Way We Worked".