Carol M. Highsmith

Carol McKinney Highsmith (born Carol Louise McKinney on May 18, 1946) is an American photographer and author. Her work documents the landscapes, architecture, and people of the rural and urban United States in a decades-long nationwide study, in progress since the 1980s. Highsmith has donated her photographs to the Library of Congress since 1992, creating a collection of nearly 100,000 images, all of which are in the public domain.

Highsmith began her nationwide photography project after extensively photographing the Willard Hotel in the early 1980s for its restoration, a project that introduced her to the works of pioneering 20th-century photojournalist Frances Benjamin Johnston. Highsmith cites Johnston as a major influence on her works, drawing on Johnston's comprehensive architectural and landscape photography of the 1920s and 1930s and her donation of her life's work to the Library of Congress. Since 2010, Highsmith has toured multiple states per year to create a broad pictorial record of the country in the 21st century, a series that she expects to complete in 2026.

Early life and studies

Childhood

Carol Louise McKinney was born to Luther Carlton McKinney II 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. 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. 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.