Portrait of America

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.