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.
In an hour-long interview with C-SPAN founder and host Brian Lamb on July 17, 2011, 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 her grandmother in Atlanta. Highsmith said that the latter, Sara Maude Janes McKinney, was a friend of Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell and other society women. "We'd spend every day at someone's pool or country club," Highsmith said. "Opera played on the radio. Grandmother taught us manners and etiquette—to sit up straight, eat with our mouths closed, and hold the soup spoon just so."
According to Highsmith, 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. 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."
Highsmith told C-SPAN that the influence of her father, a traveling salesman of everything from wave pools 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 (my sister) 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."
Highsmith has cited her childhood experiences in rural Rockingham County as an enduring memory and influence.
In 1964, Carol Highsmith (then McKinney) graduated from Minnehaha Academy in Minneapolis.Minnehaha Academy Arrow, Spring 2013, p. 26
College, first marriage, and career
Following her years at the academy, Highsmith studied, or as she puts it, "just as often partied," for a year at the now-defunct Parsons College in Fairfield, Iowa.
At Parsons, Carol McKinney met Mark Highsmith, an artist from Queens, New York, who soon graduated and enlisted in the Army. The couple married in Minneapolis, then moved to Columbus, Georgia, where Mark Highsmith was stationed at Fort Benning. Upon his deployment to Vietnam in 1966, Carol Highsmith moved to Queens, New York, after securing a position at Peters Griffin Woodward, a national radio "rep" firm in Manhattan. As an assistant traffic manager at its Park Avenue offices, she logged advertisements for radio stations across the country. It was Highsmith's introduction to her first career in the broadcasting business.
First marriage and career 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. "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.
Early career in broadcasting 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.http://library.gwu.edu/ead/ms2029.xml
In the 1970s, Highsmith broadcast from London and from Oktoberfest in Munich, conducting interviews with Germans.
Early career as photographer and work at the Willard Hotel
Highsmith worked in sales for the radio station, and in the 1970s, earned a station-paid trip to the Soviet Union, then a closed society. A client gave her a Pentax K1000 camera, the only one she owned. She later extended her trip to the People's Republic of China, where she visited rural villages. The trip fostered Highsmith's interest in documenting places visually.
After returning to the U.S., she took night-school photography classes at the Corcoran School. She was taught at the Corcoran under Frank DiPerna, who 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. She viewed a collection of 50,000 photographs of the Willard taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1901, during the hotel's glory days. The work of Johnson, a pioneering American woman in photography, were held by the Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs Division. Johnston's photos of the Beaux-Arts Willard in 1901, when it expanded from 100 to 389 rooms, were the sole source available to artisans during the Willard's grand restoration eight decades later, because no blueprints or artist's drawings had survived.
Highsmith's mostly black-and-white photos of the Willard reaffirmed her eye for detail and solidified her interest in photography, especially or decaying buildings. Highsmith's experience photographing the Willard inspired her to follow Johnson to document life across the United States, including to preserve a historic record. After the Willard was restored as a grand hotel and reopened in 1986, it displayed an extensive exhibit of Highsmith and Johnston's work in an alcove off the "Peacock Alley" corridor. In 2006, the American Institute of Architects held 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.
Photography career, 1980s to present
Around 1982, Highsmith quit her job at WMAL radio to pursue her dream of becoming a professional photographer. By 1987, she employed seven assistants at her studio at 13th and G streets NW in Washington, D.C., charging as much as $1,500 for a day of photography.
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.
When Landphair returned to Washington to join the Voice of America in 1986, he and Highsmith reconnected, and they married two years later. 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.
In 1992, the D.C. Preservation League exhibited Highsmith's cibachrome photos of Washington, D.C.
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.
In her photography of Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego in 2013, Highsmith made the Torrey pine, the endangered tree for which the golf course is named, the focal point. In a 2015 interview, Highsmith said that she considered her documentation of "living history and built environment" to be an "indestructible record of our vast nation, including sites that are fast fading, even disappearing, in the wake of growth, development, and decay."
Highsmith's decades-long project has photographed all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Her work included photographs of Texas State Fair mascot "Big Tex" before he burned in a fire, and photographs of the Lower Manhattan skyline one month before the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.