The cover photograph was taken by Ed Cooper. The rest of the color photography, unless otherwise credited, was taken by William A. Bake of Boone, North Carolina. Nearly all of the black-and-white photographs come from the files of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. About half of them were taken in the 1930s for historic recording purposes by Edouard E. Exline and Charles S. Grossman on behalf of the National Park Service. Exline was a landscape architect with the Civilian Conservation Corps and a photographer by avocation. Grossman was a structural architect for the park who was in charge of the cultural preservation program. The other photographers who have been identified are Laura Thornborough, who resided in the Smokies and wrote the book The Great Smoky Mountains; Joseph S. Hall, who has studied and written about linguistics of the Smokies since the 1930s; Harry M. Jennison, a research botanist from the University of Tennessee who worked in the park from 1935 to 1940; H.C. Wilburn, a CCC history technician who collected and purchased artifacts of mountain life; Maurice Sullivan, a CCC wildlife technician who subsequently became a Park Service naturalist; Alden Stevens, a museum specialist for the Park Service; Jim Shelton, husband of one of the Walker sisters, Sarah Caroline; George Masa, who established the Asheville Photo Service shortly after World War I; Burton Wolcott; and National Park Service photographers George A. Grant, Alan Rinehart, Fred R. Bell, M. Woodbridge Williams, and Clair Burket.

Many of the logging photographs were donated to the park by the Little River Lumber Company. Most of the photographs of Cherokees come from the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution; many of them were taken by James Mooney in the Smokies area in 1888.