C arol McKinney Highsmith (born Carol Louise McKinney on May 18, 1946) is an American photographer, author, and publisher who has photographed in all the states of the United States, as well as the District of Columbia , and Puerto Rico . She photographs the entire American vista (including landscapes, architecture, urban and rural life, and people in their work environments) in all fifty U.S. states as a record of the early 21st century.

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Highsmith is donating her life’s work of more than 100,000 images, royalty-free, to the Library of Congress , which established a rare, one-person archive.

Soon photography would rise to the forefront of her life. The career change began in 1980, when she was named WMAL’s Employee of the Year. Highsmith decided to apply the $1,000 prize award 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. Highsmith snapped photographs from Kiev to eastern Siberia .

## Some selected photos

### Inspiration

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

#### Frances Benjamin Johnston

Johnston produced studies of southern plantations, African-American and American Indian schools, national parks, and studio portraits of prominent Americans from the 1890s to 1950s. 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. 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.