Carol M. Highsmith, born 1946 in North Carolina, is a photographer, author, and publisher who has photographed the United States, including 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 50 US states as a record of the early 21st Century. Future generations will learn a great deal about our present by studying her work. Highsmith was directly influenced by two female photographers: Frances Benjamin Johnston and Dorothea Lange.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.
Carol Highsmith has donated her life’s work of more than 100,000 images, to the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
