Horace Bristol studied at the Art Center of Los Angeles before moving to San Francisco in 1933 to pursue a career in photography. While renting a studio near Ansel Adam's gallery, Bristol befriended members of “Group f/64”, including Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and Dorthea Lange. In 1937 he accompanied Lange on expeditions to California's Central Valley to document the plight of migrant farm workers.

That year, Bristol joined the staff of LIFE magazine, alongside Alfred Eisenstaedt, Peter Stackpole, and Margaret Bourke-White. He quickly garnered numerous covers and spreads. With a story submission in mind, Bristol persuaded novelist John Steinbeck to collaborate on a project about migrant farm workers. During the winter of 1938, they visited labor camps to photograph and interview the suffering workers who would become the inspiration for Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic The Grapes of Wrath.

In 1941 Edward Steichen recruited Bristol to work under his command in the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit—a select group of five photographers hired to officially document World War II. Bristol photographed key Naval battles, including the invasions of North Africa, Okinawa and Iwo Jima. Bristol's most celebrated image depicts a naked gunner manning his post in a PBY Blister plane after heroically rescuing a shot-down pilot.

Following World War II, Bristol moved his family to Japan, where he photographed the war's devastating effects and the vestiges of traditional Japanese life. He established the East-West Photo Agency and began selling his photographs of Southeast Asia to magazines throughout Europe and the United States. He was also commissioned by the U.S. Armed Forces to publish several informative books for overseas officers focusing on specific Asian countries.

In 1956, devastated by his wife's suicide, Bristol burned all the photographs and negatives at his seaside house in Japan and retired his camera, effectively ending one of the most intense photographic careers of his time.   His remaining photographs were stored and left untouched for nearly thirty years.

Bristol remarried and settled in Ojai, California, where in 1985 his youngest son came home from high school with an assignment to read The Grapes of Wrath .   Only then did Bristol open the musty footlockers that held a career's worth of images and begin to share his work.

Horace Bristol died in 1997, but not before seeing his photographs exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States and Europe.