Carol M. Highsmith
| Carol M. Highsmith | |
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Carol M. Highsmith self portrait in front of a broken mirror at the Willard Hotel in 1980
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| Born |
Carol McKinney May 18, 1946 Leaksville, North Carolina (since renamed "Eden"), United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Corcoran School of Art |
| Known for | Photography Collection of America |
| Website | CarolHighsmithAmerica.com ThisIsAmericaFoundation.org |
| Patron(s) | George F. Landegger; The Capital Group Foundation in memory of its late chairman, Jon B. Lovelace; Lyda Hill of Dallas, Texas; The Gates Frontiers Fund; The Ben May Family Foundation |
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 Q&A with Carol Highsmith, 2011, C‑SPAN
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Carol M. Highsmith (born 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 50 US states as a record of the early 21st Century.
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.
According to C. Ford Peatross, director of the Center for Architecture at the Library of Congress, "The donation of Carol Highsmith's photography is one of the greatest acts of generosity in the history of the Library of Congress." In 2013, Peatross told the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper, "[She] is not only taking photographs but creating a permanent record of the country and its people for the common good."
On April 28, 2013, the CBS television news magazine "CBS This Morning" featured Highsmith's work in a lengthy segment titled, "Saving America for Posterity at the Library of Congress". CBS Correspondent Martha Teichner told in her report: "Highsmith is at work on a decades-long project photographing all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Her pictures, thousands of them, are going to the Library of Congress and are being made available free for anyone to use." The CBS Sunday Morning report continued, "Highsmith's images also capture a disappearing America. Two weeks after she photographed Big Tex, the mascot of the Texas State Fair, he burned down. Her photograph of the New York skyline, just before 9/11, is also in the Library of Congress." CBS included more than 30 of Carol's images in the online version of its report.
In its December 2007 issue, the Library of Congress's Information Bulletin included a "Conversation with Carol Highsmith." In the article, Jeremy Adamson, the director of Collections and Services at the library, said, "Highsmith's color images are certainly of the highest technical and artistic quality. But more importantly, she has the uncanny ability to identify, focus on and capture for posterity the essential features of our social landscape and physical environment, both natural and man-made. A photograph by Carol Highsmith is a document of rare precision and beauty, revealing with exacting clarity the look and feel of people and places across our great nation."
Her work has been featured in more than 50 hardback coffee-table books, most published by Crescent Books, an imprint of Random House in New York, and by Preservation Press, the publishing arm of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
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Wikipedia