page_title: Carol M. Highsmith
section_title: Milestones
hierarchical_section_title: Carol M. Highsmith / Photography career / Milestones
caption_attribution_description: English: Yosemite National Park spans eastern portions of Tuolumne, Mariposa and Madera counties in California, United States. Español: El parque nacional de Yosemite abarca las partes orientales de los condados de Tuolumne, Mariposa y Madera en California, Estados Unidos.
context_page_description: Carol McKinney Highsmith 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 in all fifty U.S. states as a record of the early 21st century.
  Highsmith donated her life's work of more than 100,000 images, royalty-free, to the Library of Congress, which established a rare, one-person archive.
context_section_description: In 2007, the American Institute of Architects marked its 150th anniversary by inviting the public to vote on the AIA Web site for their favorite 150 U.S. architectural sites. Once the winners were selected—the Empire State Building finished first—the AIA used existing Highsmith photographs for more than 100 of the sites and commissioned her to photograph all but two of the remaining ones. One of the two—New York's Penn Station, no longer stood, and the other, the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel on Hawaiʻi Island, had been badly damaged in an earthquake; historical photographs illustrated those sites. Enlargements of Highsmith's photos for the "AIA 150" appeared in an exhibit at the Institute's headquarters at the Octagon House in Washington, DC, and remain on the AIA 150 Web site.
  In April 2009, Highsmith was one of four women included in the Library of Congress's Women's History Month Profiles on its web site.
  Each year since 1999, Highsmith has photographed monumental federal buildings across the nation for a unit of the General Services Administration, and has separately photographed art in federal buildings, including works commissioned by the Treasury Department and Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
  Highsmith has photographed several National Trust for Historic Preservation properties, including architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House in Illinois, Philip Johnson's Glass House in Connecticut, the Drayton Hall plantation house in South Carolina, and the Shadows-on-the-Teche manor home in Louisiana.
  For the Trust's Preservation Press in 1994, Highsmith and Landphair produced their first national book, America Restored, as well as a book on Washington's foreign embassies. America Restored detailed two restoration projects in each state, including the extensive renovations of the Fordyce Bathhouse in Hot Springs, Arkansas; the Sheraton Palace Hotel in San Francisco; Rockwood Manor House in Wilmington, Delaware; Georgia's Jekyll Island Historic District; the covered bridges of Rush County, Indiana; Parlange Plantation in Louisiana; Broome County, New York's, carousels; and the Battleship Texas in Houston.
  On commission from the National Park Service, Highsmith photographed homes, personal belongings, and collections of four presidents (Lincoln, Eisenhower, Truman, and Theodore Roosevelt) as well as poet Carl Sandburg, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Confederate commander Robert E. Lee, African-American businesswoman and teacher Maggie Walker, the pioneer American nurse, Clara Barton, and the Nez Perce American Indian Nation. The Park Service produced a "virtual multi-media exhibit" of Highsmith's presidential collection photographs. In 2016 and 2017, Highsmith was the featured photographer in a Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History exhibit of national park images saluting the National Park Service's 100th anniversary. In a story, "Renowned Photographer Captures America's Natural Treasures," the Voice of America displayed side-by-side photos of Highsmith's inspiration, photographic pioneer Frances Benjamin Johnston and Highsmith perched in the same location beneath a rock formation in Yellowstone National Park, a century apart. "'Do I not get that there are millions and billions of photographs being taken every day?'" Highsmith asked rhetorically," the VOA story quotes the photographer. "'I do. But unfortunately, most of those won't be around over time.'"
  In 2002 the U.S. Postal Service chose Highsmith's photograph of the Jefferson Memorial as the image for its new Priority Mail stamp.
  Eleven years later, in 2013, the USPS selected another Highsmith image, a close-up, black-and-white image of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, for a new issue of its "second ounce," meaning 20-cent denomination, stamp. According to the postal service announcement, "In designing the stamp, art director Derry Noyes chose to work with a photograph of a sculpted portrait of Lincoln rather than a more traditional illustration or painting. Carol M. Highsmith's photograph of t
caption: Yosemite National Park
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