Morrie Camhi, photographer, was born June 11, 1928, in New York City. He grew up in Los Angeles, California and graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a BA in literature in 1955. Also during this time, he worked as a photographer in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. It was this experience, as well as his work as a photography lab technician - a job he took to support himself through school - that inspired his career trajectory. He found work almost immediately as a commercial photographer and manager for Donn-Mauer Photography after graduation.

From 1960 to 1969, Camhi operated his own commercial businesses until deciding to teach. He sold his studio and joined the staff as a photography teacher at City College of San Francisco in 1972, where he would remain on staff for the entirety of his career. In his spare time, he traveled throughout the world with his wife, Lynn, photographing people he met. Camhi referred to his work as “environmental portrait photography,” social documentation primarily focused on the daily lives of everyday people and social issues such as undocumented agricultural laborers (Espejo: Reflections of the Mexican American, 1976) and inmates, their families, and the guards of the Vacaville prison system in California (The Prison Experience, 1989). Perhaps his most noted publication was the book Faces and Facets: The Jews of Greece (1995), which documented the few Greek survivors who escaped the Holocaust, as well as thriving younger generations of Jews, hoping to broaden the depiction of Jewish life as more than just the product of survival. “There's a continuing preoccupation with Holocaust issues among Jews,” he said when his exhibit The Jews of Greece opened in Petaluma in 1995, “I’ve attempted to make this broader.”

Camhi’s photographs have been exhibited at the Oakland Museum of California Art; St. Mary’s College, Los Angeles, California; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Center for Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Illinois; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona; Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, California; and at the Baldwin Photographic Gallery, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro. He is represented in the collections of the Athens Center of Photography, Greece; David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; the San Francisco Museums of Fine Arts; the Israel Museum, Tel-Aviv; and the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona.

Morrie Camhi died in September 1999.