Carol M. Highsmith

External video
Q&A with Carol Highsmith, 2011, C-SPAN[4]

Carol Louise McKinney was born to Luther Carlton McKinney and Ruth Ragsdale Carter in Leaksville, North Carolina, near the large tobacco farm owned by her maternal grandparents, Yancey Ligon Carter and Mary Elizabeth Morton. Her mother's family were planters descending from the Puritan colonist Thomas Carter and owned a plantation near Wentworth, North Carolina.[5] Highsmith's father was a manufacturer's representative, and her mother worked as the editor of Decision magazine, then the world's largest-distribution magazine, at the Minneapolis headquarters of evangelist Billy Graham.[6] She is a first cousin of the journalist Linda Carter Brinson and the late folk artist Benny Carter, as well as a niece of Lieutenant-Colonel J. P. Carter and 15 of his siblings.[7]

In an hour-long interview with C-SPAN founder and host Brian Lamb on July 17, 2011,[4] Highsmith spoke extensively of her childhood in Minneapolis and her summers in the South with her North Carolina "granny" and Atlanta, Georgia "grandmother," who went by that title alone. Carol and her sister Sara spent the first half of each summer on granny's Carolina tobacco farm and the second half as part of the high society with grandmother in Atlanta. Highsmith says that the latter, like her sister also named Sara McKinney, was a friend of Gone With the Wind authorMargaret Mitchell and other society women. "We'd spend every day at someone's pool or country club," Highsmith says. "Opera played on the radio. Grandmother taught us manners and etiquette—to sit up straight, eat with our mouths closed, hold the soup spoon just so."[4]

The Carter Homeplace, located on the family plantation in Wentworth, where Highsmith's grandfather was born

Highsmith says that her rural granny was wealthier than her refined grandmother in Atlanta. "Granny and Granddad's large tobacco spread involved a lot of backbreaking work but was highly successful," she says. "Grandmother and grandfather [in Atlanta], had lost everything [including his furniture business] in two fires and the Great Depression. But grandmother's friends made like nothing had happened. They'd have her to dinner, play bridge and canasta, even take her on cruises to Europe and have their chauffeurs drive her as if she were still part of the aristocracy."[4]

Highsmith told C-SPAN that the influence of her father, a traveling salesman of everything from place mats to motor buses, and her own, mostly backroad travels through several states to reach her grandmothers imbued her with a fascination about America, "especially roadside America. The old car in which my mother would drive Sara and me south would break down every year, it seemed, in little towns. We'd have to stay overnight in dingy tourist courts or rented rooms above the kinds of old service stations I love to photograph today."[4]

In February 2012, Carol Highsmith returned to her birth city in North Carolina to record a tape about her childhood experiences. It was played four months later at the opening of the Museum and Archives of Rockingham County (MARC) in Wentworth. The museum's newsletter called it "the journey of a hometown girl."[8] Highsmith's summer trips to her granny's farm "left an indelible memory of carefree days, delicious food, and wonderful times with family and friends," it continued.[8] Highsmith's experiences in rural Rockingham County were also recounted in a lengthy feature story about her life and career in the Greensboro, N.C., News & Record on August 5, 2017. The article, by Dawn DeCwikiel-Kane, included Highsmith's reflection on the significance of her (then) 25-year donation of more than 42,000 images to the Library of Congress: "'It's my legacy,' she said. "But it's our [nation's] legacy.'" The story, entitled "America's Photographer" won a 2017 first-place award in the Profile Feature category in an annual contest sponsored by the North Carolina Press Association.[9]

In 1964, Carol Highsmith (then McKinney) graduated from Minnehaha Academy in Minneapolis, Minnesota, one of the nation's oldest private, Christian secondary schools, from which, in 2016, she was one of six graduates honored with the Distinguished Alumni Award, presented to those "who exemplify Christian faith, leadership, and service which positively impacts local, national and/or global communities, demonstrates outstanding achievement in a chosen field of endeavor, and has made a significant contribution of time, talent or treasure to Minnehaha Academy."[10] In a 2013 profile of Highsmith, the Arrow, the Minnehaha Academy alumni magazine, quoted Highsmith:

The 1960s were a magical time. They remind me of what I've read about the liberating, transitional 1920s. We were at the right age to be profoundly affected by the churning changes in our times. Little did we know how profound and lasting would be the effects of the civil rights movement, landing a man on the moon, the rock'n'roll revolution, the Vietnam War and the protests against it, the social and counterculture movement, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Kennedy Brothers. I am the driven, creative, and somewhat unpredictable person I am partly because of those rebellious times, framed against the backdrop of solid, values-oriented Midwest surroundings. When I attended Minnehaha Academy, I was voted Most Mischievous! Perhaps there's a lesson there, that anyone, even average, fun-loving students, can achieve a life of substance, given determination and half a chance.[11]

When Mark Highsmith returned from Vietnam in 1967, he was assigned to Fort Bragg, and the couple briefly moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina. Shortly thereafter, Mark Highsmith was discharged from the Army, and the Highsmiths relocated to Philadelphia, where Marc enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and rented art-studio space downtown. Carol worked at WPHL-TV, the home of "Summertime at the Pier," a teenage dance show hosted by Philadelphia disc jockey Ed Hurst on Atlantic City's Steel Pier in nearby New Jersey.

Highsmith wrote promotional copy and produced shows. One of her jobs was to assist Bill "Wee Willie" Webber on his children's show, the Wee Willie Webber Colorful Cartoon Club, Highsmith was pictured in a Philadelphia Inquirer advertisement for the station, strumming a guitar. "Take Over a TV Station (for 50 seconds)," the ad copy read. "TV 17 doesn't care who you are. How old you are. Or how you think. As long as you or your group can write and sing music.... So if you really care, stop griping. And start writing."

The year 1969 brought a shattering, life-changing event. As Carol was driving to Philadelphia from Atlantic City, the radio station to which she was listening broadcast a devastating news item, that Mark Highsmith, a young, aspiring artist, had committed suicide by gun in his studio.[12] "They actually broadcast such things, with names and all, back then," Carol says. "I pulled over and sobbed and sobbed and somehow made it home to a horrible scene."

Mark had returned from Vietnam with post traumatic stress disorder. Though horrified and faced with an uncertain future at best, Carol resolved to get a college degree and, in her words, "make something of myself." She moved to KYW-TV and began work in broadcast sales. All the while, Westinghouse Broadcasting, KYW's corporate owner, gave Highsmith a foothold in college by paying for her college coursework at the University of Pennsylvania, on nights and weekends.

In 1976, Highsmith moved to Washington, D.C., and spent six years as a senior account executive for another market leader, radio station WMAL while taking classes at American University, also paid for by her employer, ABC. She served on boards of directors, including that of the Greater Washington Board of Trade.[13]

In 1979, Highsmith won a national contest, sponsored by the Radio Advertising Bureau in New York, for the nation's most unusual sales effort. This stemmed from remote broadcasts from London and the Oktoberfest in Munich that she had devised and organized for her station in Washington. She traveled with the broadcast team on both trips. ABC ran a full-page ad in The New York Times promoting the broadcast from London.

At Oktoberfest in Munich, she later recalled in a portfolio of her life's "experiential learning" that she would submit for college credits at American University, "we broadcast from a different beer tent each night from a table with 6,000 drunk Germans singing around us. Since we had a language barrier, we could not easily interview people as we had in London. However, we did arrange some interesting interviews with Germans who spoke English. We interspersed the live cut-ins with German tunes, and our loyal listeners joined in back home."[14]

Soon, and quite unexpectedly, though Highsmith had rarely even picked up a camera in her life, photography would rise to the forefront of Highsmith's life. A permanent change to that career began in 1980, when she was named WMAL's Employee of the Year. Highsmith decided to apply the $1,000 award prize toward a trip to the Soviet Union. A longtime client gave her an inexpensive Pentax K1000, a small, manual-focus single-lens reflex camera that shoots 35-millimeter film, which she used to snap photographs from Kiev to eastern Siberia. One or two years later, having won yet another sales award from the radio station, Highsmith undertook an exploration of China — then very much behind the Iron Curtain, often called "Red China," and off-limits to Americans. That visit took her to many parts of the far-flung nation, including some rural villages in which, she recounted years later, interview[15] she often the only Caucasian that many of her peasant photo subjects had ever seen. Nor had they ever been photographed by a westerner, if at all.

Back in the States at her broadcast-sales job in Washington, Highsmith was surprised and pleased with the informal, rave reviews of the images she had taken abroad — so much so that she was soon determined to further explore photography while continuing her broadcast work and "pecking away," as she calls it, on a college degree. She studied photography at American University under noted art photographer Anne Zelle and took night-school photography classes, taught by photographer Frank DiPerna, founder of the Fine Art Photography Program at the Corcoran College of Art and Design.[16]

DiPerna assigned each class member to photograph a model in an unusual location in metropolitan Washington. Highsmith chose the crumbling Willard Hotel, once the lavish "Hotel of Presidents" that had been closed since 1968.[17][18] Her mostly black-and-white photos taken there reaffirmed her eye for detail and solidified her interest in photographic art.[19]

Carol M. Highsmith photograph of model in Willard Hotel

It was at the Willard that Highsmith first learned of American female photographic pioneer Frances Benjamin Johnston, and where she launched her photography career. The hotel was deserted, stripped of its furnishings and fixtures, and slated for demolition. "[The Willard's] main tenant was a bum who was setting fires on the sixth floor," Highsmith told the New York Times when the newspaper recounted the hotel's long history in 2006. "There were rats the size of cats. If I didn't take pictures, what would it look like in a few more years?"[20] In its Winter 1995 issue, Old House Interiors magazine also quoted her: "I started to think, if this can happen to America's Main Street, what other buildings are decaying that we don't even know about, and who's documenting them?".[21]

Johnston, who had done a full study of the Beaux-Arts hotel in 1901, when it expanded from 100 to 389 rooms, and whose yellowed photo prints were the only source available to artisans during the Willard's grand restoration eight decades later,[22] became Highsmith's professional inspiration.[19] Johnston, too, When the decrepit Willard was finally saved through the efforts of a spirited "Don't Tear it Down" campaign, and then restored for its reopening in 1986, the only record available to those who re-created many of the hotel's lavish features were Johnston's faded, black-and-white images. Not a single blueprint or artist's drawing had survived the gutting of the historic hotel.[21]

"I was sucked into a moment of history," the Washington media quoted Highsmith in a 1988 profile. "I didn't care if I got paid. I didn't care if I ate. I had to take those photographs. When the Willard opened, people called me from all over the world. I was the only one who had any images of the famous hotel."

For a year after the grand hotel reopened, it displayed an extensive exhibit of Highsmith and Johnston's work in an alcove off the "Peacock Alley" corridor.[23] That exhibit remains as a permanent collection in smaller form.

In 2006, the American Institute of Architects would mount a four-month comparative exhibit of Highsmith and Johnston's work called "Two Windows on the Willard." Like another AIA one-person exhibit of Highsmith's work, titled "Structures of our Times: 31 Buildings That Changed Modern Life" in 2002, the "Two Windows" study traveled to several locations across the country.[24]

By that time, Highsmith was well into her photography career, having left radio behind in 1984. She had pieced together a small, primarily architectural, photography practice.

In a 1987 Washington Post story headlined, "Doing What Comes Naturally," Don Oldenburg wrote of Highsmith's mid-career change:

"'You just sit and stare into space and think about what you'd really like to be doing,' the 41-year-old District resident recalls of her final months at WMAL radio five years ago. That was before she quit to make her dream career come true. She wanted to be a photographer....

"Ironically, those dreams of the ideal occupation that now and then distract most people from the workday grind, have traditionally been derided as detours from the American Dream. Those few individuals who actually act on their career fantasies have long been considered ne'er-do-wells, malingerers and daydreamers. Until they succeed. . . . 'It carved out a niche for me,' says Highsmith from her studio at 13th and G streets NW, where she employs seven assistants and charges up to $1,500 a day. The Willard photographs already are destined to become part of the photographic archives of architecture at the Library of Congress. Highsmith says she still gets goose bumps to think she's a professional photographer.

"Bob Swain believes that people like Highsmith, who make their fantasies their business, are 'the wave of the very near future.' The chairman of Swain & Swain Inc., a New York outplacement firm, bases that prediction partly on a recent survey he conducted of his clients—predominantly midlevel managers and professionals who have been 'displaced' by their corporations and sent to Swain for career counseling.

"'Eighty-two percent of them admitted wanting to do something like that ... there is clearly a tendency to fantasize,' says Swain. 'Eighteen percent actually do it.'"[25]

Asked her personal motto by the Washington Times in 1989 in one of the newspaper's periodic profile of "doers," Highsmith replied, "A little hard work never hurt anyone."[26]

Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City

Highsmith landed a contract to photograph another historic building on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a turreted building called Sears House, then containing the Washington offices of the Sears, Roebuck Co., where Mathew Brady had studios in which he and his assistants photographed Washington luminaries during and after the Civil War. Her work at Sears House would lead to Highsmith's first photographic honor, a 1985 Award of Excellence from Communication Arts magazine.[27]

In 1987, Highsmith's tie to "The Avenue of Presidents" solidified when she was hired by the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Commission to document its wave of renovations on the avenue.[28]

Pennsylvania Avenue: America's Main Street, published by the American Institute of Architects' AIA Press in 1988, became the first of her dozens of books. Detailing the transition of the avenue's south side into the "Federal Triangle" and the methodical redevelopment of its shoddy north side, the book was augmented by historic photographs and a text by Ted Landphair—who had been WMAL's news director in the 1970s but barely knew Highsmith before leaving the station to work in other markets.

When Landphair returned to Washington to join the Voice of America in 1986, he and Highsmith reconnected, and they married two years later as the Pennsylvania Avenue book was going to press. Carol M. Highsmith had added a collaborator husband and four stepchildren to her busy life. Landphair would soon be the principal writer of books featuring Highsmith's work as well as the historian, trip planner, driver, grip, and, as he put it, "Man Friday" on dozens of the couple's photography expeditions throughout the United States.

U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had spearheaded Pennsylvania Avenue's renovation during his days as an aide to President John F. Kennedy in the 1960s and who penned the foreword to Highsmith and Landphair's America's Main Street book, wrote the couple in 2000: "As you both know, it took forty years, eight presidents, and a great succession of Congressional enactments to revive the Avenue, and you deserve a considerable share of the credit."

In 1992, the Library of Congress accepted 500 of Highsmith's photographs as the first installment of her continuing work to document architectural transitions in the nation's capital.[29] The collection would grow and become nationwide as Highsmith and Landphair began to travel to the 50 United States to produce photographs for her books on American cities, states, and regions.

That same year, 1992, the D.C. Preservation League exhibited Highsmith's cibachrome photos of Washington historic landmarks. "Her camera peers into dark, shaded porches in a shot of turn-of-the-century houses ... then glances down the clapboards of spare, wooden row houses build a decade before," the Washington Post reported.[30] "With the exception of a canal boat gliding along the C&O [Canal], there's nothing touristy here. It's Washington as the locals know it."

And in 1992 as well, the National Endowment for the Arts presented Highsmith with its largest individual grant, a $20,000 Design Arts fellowship and individual project award.[31] The award funded her and Landphair's travels to the western United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, to photograph examples of historic restoration for the America Restored book.

Neon sign of the Lollipop Motel in North Wildwood, New Jersey

Highsmith deepened her affinity for architecture by documenting various stages of buildings' renewal for contractors, architects, and developers. "Shooting enormous spaces in uncertain lighting conditions, her large format images reveal high quality and fine detail, capturing the splendor of the subject matter, be it a building in the midst of destruction or the elegance of a formal room," American Photographers magazine commented in 1989.[32]

From 2000 to 2002, a three-year grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation enabled Highsmith to photograph disadvantaged families in 22 cities where the foundation was active.[33]

Later, the library's online Prints & Photographs Catalog description of the growing Carol M. Highsmith Archive noted that, "starting in 2002, Highsmith provided scans or photographs she shot digitally with new donations to allow rapid online access throughout the world. Her generosity in dedicating the rights to the American people for free access also makes this Archive a very special resource".[2]

In March 2009, the Library of Congress profiled four women, including Highsmith, during Women's History Month. The others were suffragist leader Susan B. Anthony, early-20th-century magazine illustrator Elizabeth Shippen Green, and retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.[34]

Big Tex at Fair Park in Dallas

Highsmith's travels took her to more remote destinations, capturing covered bridges from Vermont to Indiana, murals and neon figures, classic cars and old motor courts and a giant blue concrete whale along U.S. Route 66, "doo wop" motels on the New Jersey shore, a mining tipple in Wyoming and shuttered gas stations in Southside Virginia, abandoned steel mills and plantation ruins in Alabama, kudzu-covered barns in the Carolinas, roadside curiosities such as a four-story donut and a giant "Aunt Jemima" that became a gift shop, storefront churches and drive-in theaters and brick sections of the old National Road alongside a modern interstate highway.[35]

From this work, she developed a subspecialty that she calls "Disappearing America."[36] "After interviewing Highsmith as she was photographing the Torrey Pines Golf Course in 2013, San Diego Union-Tribune reporter John Wilkens wrote: "She ... has a passion for things that are disappearing, which made the tree the golf course is named after an appealing focal point. The Torrey is the rarest pine in the U.S."[37]

"I work every day with a heartfelt commitment to document the living history and built environment of our times," Highsmith told officials of the This is America! Foundation, which is raising funds to send her on yet another 50-state photographic exploration. "I consider my work an indestructible record of our vast nation, including sites that are fast fading, even disappearing, in the wake of growth, development, and decay."[38]

Houston, Texas Skyline image is part of the Lyda Hill Texas Collection at the Library of Congress

Carol Highsmith's work has been featured in more than 50 hardback coffee-table books, most published by Crescent Books, an imprint of Random House in New York, and by Preservation Press, the publishing arm of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Highsmith also photographed for, and her publishing company, Chelsea Publishing, Inc., published, six additional books: Forgotten No More, about the Korean War Veterans' Memorial;[44] Union Station: A Decorative History, about Washington's historic train terminal;[45] Reading Terminal and Market: Philadelphia's Gateway and Grand Convention Center;[46] The Mount Washington: A Century of Grandeur; and Houston: Deep in the Heart.

Early in her career, Highsmith photographed interior and exterior architecture. But as she and Landphair, her writer-husband, traveled the country to every state and major city to work on Random House Crescent Books imprint "Photographic Tour" and smaller "Pictorial Souvenir" book series about U.S. cities, states, and regions, her scope broadened to be a photographic documentarian. She photographed ordinary people and everyday sites as well as soaring architecture, natural landscapes, national parks and monuments, Civil War battlefields, and engineering marvels.[47]

Horse in field in Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park in Johnson City, Texas

Her Random House book subjects included the cities San Francisco, New Orleans, Washington, and Chicago; New York's five boroughs; the states of Florida, Colorado, and Virginia; the Pacific Northwest and New England Coast; as well as lighthouses, barns, Amish culture, and the Appalachian Trail.[48]

Yosemite National Park is part of the Jon B. Lovelace Collection at the Library of Congress

In 1998, Random House sent Highsmith and Landphair to Ireland, where they visually represented every county of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, for Ireland: A Photographic Tour, their only book set outside the United States.[49]

In early 2002, Crescent Books published World Trade Center: Tribute and Remembrance, about the 2001 September 11 attacks in New York and exclusively featuring Highsmith's photographs. She had taken aerial photographs of the Twin Towers two months before they fell.[50]

That same year, Highsmith and Landphair collaborated on Deep in the Heart, a book about Houston, Texas, financed by that city's International Protocol Alliance. They also produced The Mount Washington: A Century of Grandeur, on the White Mountains resort. And Highsmith collaborated with architectural writer Dixie Legler on Historic Bridges of Maryland, published by that state's department of transportation.[51]

In 2007, Highsmith photographed, and author Ryan Coonerty described, 52 monuments and other public sites in a National Geographic book Etched in Stone.[52]

Having previously privately produced a 256-page coffee-table book for the funder of her photographic excursion to the state of Alabama in 2010, Highsmith in 2013 created a similar book, with a foreword by Librarian of Congress James Billington and short text by California historian Kevin Starr, about the Golden State. Entitled "California," it was published by Highsmith's Chelsea Publishing, Inc., and publicly sold.[53]

Electric City sign in Scranton, Pennsylvania

Old red barn near Muscle Shoals in northern Alabama

Young cowboy in Fort Worth, Texas

In 2009, the Library of Congress acquired Carol Highsmith's 21st Century America "born digital" collection (photographs that originated in the digital format rather than as film transferred to digital) and expect it to grow to the largest photographic born digital collection at the Library of Congress. This archive, "Carol M. Highsmith's America: Documenting the 21st Century", includes 1,000 images taken across the country. The collection emphasizes what Highsmith calls "Disappearing America," including 200 shots taken along U.S. Route 66 in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma.[19]

"The more she travels across the country, the more convinced she is about the need to capture in photographs a rapidly changing America," noted a Library of Congress bulletin. "'The America I knew is disappearing at lightning speed,' [Highsmith] observed."[19]

Having previously photographed the Library of Congress's own iconic facilities from time to time on her 4x5" architectural camera of the same sort used by noted photographers as early as the 1930s — some of the images of which were featured in Life magazine's December 1992 edition — Highsmith, by special invitation in 2006 and 2007 spent several Sundays producing a special study of more than 400 color digital images of the Library's iconic Jefferson Building, which opened in 1897, toward the end of America's "Gilded Age" of ornate architecture.[54]

Although she had already photographed in every U.S. state for her Library of Congress named archive, in February 2010 she started what would become a thirteen-year journey to more intensively document the reaches of every state in a series to be informally titled "This is America,"—also donating these images, free of royalties, to the Library of Congress. "She acknowledges that getting all 50 is going to take a while—15 more years, by her estimate," would write CityLab magazine, the online publication of The Atlantic magazine, five years later. "But Highsmith's not deterred, nor will she narrow her scope. 'Everywhere is important,' she says. 'You tell me I don't need to go to Joplin, Missouri? Things happen. Things change. I will work on this until I die.'"[55]

Highsmith is sometimes called "America's Photographer," including in a banner headline in an August 15, 2017 story about her career in the print edition of the Greensboro, North Carolina, News-Record newspaper. "So far, Highsmith has donated about 42,000 photographs to the Library of Congress," the newspaper reported. "She aims to donate 100,000 images before she's done. 'It's my legacy," she said. "But it's our [nation's] legacy.'"[56]

In 2023 near the conclusion of Highsmith's state-study odyssey, another publication, the March digital edition of Professional Photographer magazine would go the "America's Photographer" description of the photographer one better, titling the story, "America's Documentarian: Carol Highsmith's Gift to the nation."</ref>https://www.ppa.com/ppmag/articles/americas-documentarian.</ref>

Alabama, the first state in Highsmith's "This is America" study Alabama became the George F. Landegger Alabama Library of Congress Collection within the Highsmith archive at the national library.[57]

George F. Landegger also donated funds to the Library of Congress to document Washington, D.C. neighborhoods[58] and the state of Connecticut.[59] The Connecticut study, intermingled with Highsmith's examinations of the two states (California and Texas) that followed Alabama. The Connecticut work, completed in 2015, culminated in both an archive of Highsmith images in the Library of Congress collection and a coffee-table book, simply titled Connecticut, published by Chelsea Publishing Inc. the same year.[60]

On two photographic journeys over a six-month period, first in late 2012 and then in early 2013, Highsmith and Landphair worked in California, producing images for her Library of Congress collection.[61] This body of work, titled The Jon B. Lovelace California Library of Congress Collection, was donated in honor of Lovelace, who died in 2011. Lovelace managed the Capital Group and was chairman of the J. Paul Getty Trust.[62]

In an April 16, 2013, news release from the California Department of Parks and Recreation, Jenan Saunders, California's deputy state historic officer, wrote of Highsmith's work in the Golden State, "Highsmith's efforts produced glorious views of California's lush valleys and rocky shores, forbidding deserts, remarkable buildings, bountiful fields and stunning state and national parks. Her eye fell often on California's state parks. There are images from more than 35 California State Parks included in the visual compilation, from Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park on the north coast to Salton Sea State Recreation Area in the south."[63]

Also in 2013, Artepublishing, a division of the fine-art book publisher Hugh L. Levin LLC, produced an electronic book, "Great Photographs From the Library of Congress," that included more than 700 images from the library's Prints & Photographs Division. Most were black-and-white historical photos, going back to the Civil War work of Mathew Brady, but 22—more than any devoted to any other photographer—were chosen from Carol M. Highsmith's archive of late-20th- and early-21st-century photographs.[64]

In June 2015, Highsmith began work in her fifth and sixth states—Colorado and Wyoming—to visually study them in depth. The plan for this work called for return working trips to these states in January 2016 and again in June that year. These photographic explorations were underwritten by the Gates Frontiers Fund, a private, Colorado-based charitable organization.[65]

Upon her return to her Washington, D.C.-area home in October 2015, Highsmith was the keynote speaker in the first of several planned online seminars (or "Webinars,") organized by the Library of Congress's Education Division. She described her career and answered online attendees' questions about possible applications of her collection to the classroom.[66]

The most recent volume in Highsmith's series of state-specific thick coffee-table books, about the colorful and history-rich Deep South state of Louisiana, was produced and published in 2022. Whimsically titled, Why Louisiana Ain't Mississippi . . . or Any Place Else!, it borrowed that name from an ongoing series of presentations by the state's Commissioner of Administration, Jay Dardenne, a former Louisiana lieutenant governor, who wrote both the book's introduction and an opening poem called "She is Louisiana." As usual in the select series of Highsmith state-specific books, husband Landphair wrote its many captions. The book was underwritten by Louisiana Public Broadcasting, which used it as a companion to a fresh documentary about the state, also featuring Highsmith's photos and Dardenne's stories, and also carrying the "why Louisiana ain't Mississippi" reference in its title.[67]

Over and above her relentless pursuit of images of everyday America, since 2011 Highsmith has captured images of monumental U.S. courthouses, federal office buildings, and other sites such as U.S. border stations for a unit of the General Services Administration,[68]sometimes called "America's landlord" since it leases space to other entities in more than 1,500 buildings across the nation. Even earlier under a separate contract, Highsmith photographed art in federal buildings, including works commissioned by the Treasury Department and Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression of the 1930s.[69] In addition to GSA's use of these images, they are freely shared with the nation and world through the Carol M. Highsmith Library of Congress archive.

Carol M. Highsmith was directly influenced by two female photographers: Frances Benjamin Johnston and Dorothea Lange.[12]

Johnston, whom Highsmith calls her "beau ideal," produced studies of southern plantations, African-American and American Indian schools, national parks, and studio portraits of prominent Americans from the 1890s to 1950s.[70] Highsmith became aware of Johnston's work in the early 1980s, following her first significant photography commission that took her into Washington's Willard Hotel in the early 1980s. There, she learned not only that Johnston had photographed the Willard at the time of its grand reopening in 1901, but also that her photos were the only available record from which artisans could recreate its early grandeur when the hotel was once again restored after nearly falling to the wrecker's ball during Highsmith's time there nearly a century later.[19] It was during this time that Highsmith was told about Johnston's donation of her lifetime body of photographic work to the Library of Congress; she immediately informed the Library's Prints & Photographs Division's curators that she intended to do likewise.[19]

In a story, "Renowned Photographer Captures America's Natural Treasures," the Voice of America displayed side-by-side photos of Frances Benjamin Johnston and Highsmith perched in the same location beneath a rock formation in Yellowstone National Park, a century apart. "'Do I not get that there are millions and billions of photographs being taken every day?'" Highsmith asked rhetorically," the VOA story quotes the photographer. "'I do. But unfortunately, most of those won't be around over time.'"[71]

Lange is remembered for her fieldwork for the federal Farm Security Administration among migrant workers and other dispossessed families during the Great Depression of the 1930s.[72] Decades after Lange's work, Highsmith photographed surviving shacks in the Weedpatch "Okie" camp in Kern County, California, that was the setting for much of John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath.[73]

It is no coincidence that the two featured photos in a 2022 story in the Hagerstown Record-Mail newspaper about Highsmith and Landphair's recently purchased 1910 Victorian home in that small Maryland city include one of Highsmith in her office beneath her large framed copy of the iconic photo of Frances Benjamin Johnston shockingly (for the times) posing with a beer stein, cigarette in hand, and hiked-up dress in 1896; and Carol in the home's foyer beside a historic 5x7 field camera prominently positioned to recall Dorothea Lange's travels through the migrant camps of the Great Depression.[74]

"Two hundred years from now, people might want to study what types of screws were sold, and they will be able to study my images and find detail to understand how things have changed," Highsmith said in 2008. "These photos can tell a million and one stories. That's what sets still photography apart. With such tremendous quality, you can sit for hours and study a photo."[75]

90-year-old Kate Carter in North Carolina log cabin

Yosemite National Park

Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall

Siegfried & Roy by Carol M. Highsmith

The Jefferson Memorial at dusk

In 2007, the American Institute of Architects marked its 150th anniversary by inviting the public to vote on the AIA Web site for their favorite 150 U.S. architectural sites. Once the winners were selected—the Empire State Building finished first—the AIA used existing Highsmith photographs for more than 100 of the sites and commissioned her to photograph all but two of the remaining ones.[76] One of the two—New York's Penn Station, no longer stood, and the other, the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel on Hawaiʻi Island, had been badly damaged in an earthquake; historical photographs illustrated those sites. Enlargements of Highsmith's photos for the "AIA 150" appeared in an exhibit at the Institute's headquarters at the Octagon House in Washington, DC, and remain on the AIA 150 Web site.[77]

In April 2009, Highsmith was one of four women included in the Library of Congress's Women's History Month Profiles on its web site.[78]

Highsmith has photographed several National Trust for Historic Preservation properties, including architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House in Illinois, Philip Johnson's Glass House in Connecticut, the Drayton Hall plantation house in South Carolina, and the Shadows-on-the-Teche manor home in Louisiana.[79]

For the Trust's Preservation Press in 1994, Highsmith and Landphair produced their first national book, America Restored, as well as a book on Washington's foreign embassies.[80] America Restored detailed two restoration projects in each state, including the extensive renovations of the Fordyce Bathhouse in Hot Springs, Arkansas; the Sheraton Palace Hotel in San Francisco; Rockwood Manor House in Wilmington, Delaware; Georgia's Jekyll Island Historic District; the covered bridges of Rush County, Indiana; Parlange Plantation in Louisiana; Broome County, New York's, carousels; and the Battleship Texas in Houston.[81]

On commission from the National Park Service, Highsmith photographed homes, personal belongings, and collections of four presidents (Lincoln, Eisenhower, Truman, and Theodore Roosevelt) as well as poet Carl Sandburg, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Confederate commander Robert E. Lee, African-American businesswoman and teacher Maggie Walker, the pioneer American nurse, Clara Barton, and the Nez Perce American Indian Nation. The Park Service produced a "virtual multi-media exhibit" of Highsmith's presidential collection photographs.[82] In 2016 and 2017, Highsmith was the featured photographer in a Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History exhibit of national park images saluting the National Park Service's 100th anniversary.[83]

In 2002 the U.S. Postal Service chose Highsmith's photograph of the Jefferson Memorial as the image for its new Priority Mail stamp.[84] Eleven years later, in 2013, the USPS selected another Highsmith image, a close-up, black-and-white image of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, for a new issue of its "second ounce," meaning 20-cent denomination, stamp. According to the postal service announcement, "In designing the stamp, art director Derry Noyes chose to work with a photograph of a sculpted portrait of Lincoln rather than a more traditional illustration or painting. Carol M. Highsmith's photograph of this iconic Lincoln statue offered a fresh take. Noyes selected a detail of the image in order to highlight the President's features most effectively."[85]

"America is ever changing and the people and places that shape our everyday lives must be captured to tell the important stories of our present and our past to future generations," Richard Moe, the president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, wrote. "I can't think of a better photographer to undertake [the] immensely important task of documenting America than Carol Highsmith."[86]

In July 2016, Highsmith instituted a $1.35 billion lawsuit against two stock photography organizations, Getty Images and Alamy, and their agents, over their attempts to assert copyright over, and charge fees for the use of, 18,755 of her images, after Getty sent her a bill for one of her own images that she had used on her own website.[87][88][89] In November 2016, after the judge hearing the case dismissed much of Highsmith's case on grounds that she had relinquished her claim of copyright when she donated much of her work to the Library of Congress (and thus to the public domain), the remainder of the lawsuit was settled by the parties out of court.[90]

On August 18, 2016, Creative Commons, a nonprofit American organization that issues "public copyright licenses" enabling the free distribution of otherwise copyrighted work, said of the photographer on its website, "Highsmith's project predates our work as Creative Commons, but her work is very much in the spirit of our community. By removing copyright restrictions from her photographs, Highsmith is engaged in the important work of growing a robust commons built on gratitude and usability; her singular archive at the Library of Congress is a testament to one woman's passion and generosity."[91]

In 2018, Carol M. Highsmith's work was featured in a six-month-long exhibition at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, California—assembled by American photography curator Anne Wilkes Tucker—showcasting images selected from more than 14 million visual items permanently housed at the Library of Congress. Of the 440 photographs in what was called "Not an Ostrich: and Other Images from America's Library," 48 were Highsmith's.[92] For a documentary movie that accompanied the exposition, a crew followed Highsmith "on the road" in Clarksdale, Mississippi and elsewhere a year earlier, in 2017.[93]

Motel neon in Arizona

The exhibit's title was borrowed from a 1930 photograph in the national library's collection of a rare, fluffy-feathered goose held by an actress at a Madison Square Garden poultry show, thought to be taken by an unnamed photographer in the employ of the Underwood & Underwood Co. that produced stereograph views.[94]

In what the Annenberg museum described as "a captivating conversation," Highsmith was the featured speaker at an "Iris Nights" lecture series presentation, conducted by curator Tucker, of "the beauty, humor, and humanity of America." They discussed Highsmith's "decades-long project to photograph America with images from all 50 states. The conversation also covered her decision to donate all of her images from the project to the Library of Congress, her experiences 'on the road,' [she had just completed a study of Arizona and was headed to the states of Washington, Oregon, New York, and Rhode Island], and the influence of other trailblazing women photographers, such as Dorothea Lange and Frances Benjamin Johnston, both of whom have inspired Highsmith."[95]

Horse jingle in rural Texas

In a review of the exhibit by the online LensCulture contemporary-photography magazine, Gena Williams wrote, "Juxtapositions are an important part of Not an Ostrich. One wall features Carol Highsmith's gleaming (and often scenic) images of Americana. 'Highsmith's view of America is a positive one. She has an eye for beauty,' [curator] Tucker says, comparing her work to photographers such as Ansel Adams."[96] The Lensculture review also published four of Highsmith's photographs, including one of a giant, lighted "MOM" artistic installation taken at the 2009 Burning Man "community and art" celebration in Black Rock Desert, Nevada.[96]

In 2022, the Library of Congress itself opened an exhibit adapted from the Annenberg show that includes a display of 50 Highsmith images (about 12.5 percent of the total number of those featured), as well as information about her and her career, in the library's original Thomas Jefferson Building). The exhibit also shows visitors a looped copy of a film from the Annenberg show about the vast Library of Congress photo collection in which Highsmith is prominently featured at work in the field and in the Library of Congress reading room itself.[97]

While tens of thousands of Highsmith's images are freely available to anyone, anywhere, in her Library of Congress named archive,[98] she also receives requests for use of her photos from people and companies worldwide and from writers and Web site operators hoping to illustrate stories about American life and the American scene. In just three examples: for an article on the Flickr site, someone asked for her images to demonstrate the vast array of signs, old and new, across the nation.[99] The "Curbside Classic" Web site asked Carol for additional examples of roadside classic scenes and oddities.[100] And the Digital Transitions retailer that sells the Phase One IQ4 150-megapixel digital camera that is Highsmith's principal shooting tool, asked her for reflections on her long career and published an array of her images in a featured story online.[101]

In the Library of Congress's own blog of March 29, 2021, titled "Library Photographer Carol Highsmith: Documenting the Nation’s Beauty and Resilience," novelist Neely Tucker wrote, "Even in the midst of a pandemic that has buried dreams and kept a tight grip on the nation’s psyche, Library photographer at large Carol M. Highsmith wants us to fall in love with America — to see its washed-face beauty and, through it, all that unites us. . . . Although she’s traveled in every state shooting life in urban and rural settings since 1980, her road trips during the COVID-19 pandemic have been challenging. Her vivid photographs have captured crowd-less landmarks and street scenes, empty highways and shuttered businesses. But, she says, the images also denote American resilience. You just have to look closely. . . . The Prints and Photographs Division houses her life’s body of work – close to 100,000 photographs — making her the only living photographer documenting America’s milestones to have an individual namesake collection."[102]

"Her aim is to provide a visual record of what she calls “our moment in time,” the Sketchbook blog of the international art site Meural, which purchases several of Highsmith's images," wrote in 2016. "And she intends to spend the rest of her life documenting America. She is the only living photographer to be showcased by the Library, which describes her work and donation as 'one of the greatest acts of generosity' in the institution’s history."[103]

Over the years, Carol Highsmith has given several interviews and speeches recounting stories of the array of "photo ops" and publishing opportunities that she and her husband have encountered and, in most cases, enjoyed. In the March 2023 edition of Professional Photographers magazine, she encapsulated her career thusly:

"I really believe in what I am doing. I think there is no better person than me to talk about how wonderful the USA is, because I have seen it all.

"But it’s not about me or my legacy. It's about us. It is about this wonderful nation’s legacy ... documented for the ages.”

"After a long pause, she adds, 'I feel I have the most important project on earth: to tell Americans that we need to appreciate what we have. And to realize how blessed we are.'”[104]