page_title: Carol M. Highsmith
section_title: Annenberg Space for Photography Exhibit
hierarchical_section_title: Carol M. Highsmith / Photography career / Annenberg Space for Photography Exhibit
caption_attribution_description: English: Motel neon in Arizona
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 2018, Carol M. Highsmith's work was featured in a six-month-long exhibition at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, California—assembled by American photography curator Anne Wilkes Tucker—showcasting images selected from more than 14 million visual items permanently housed at the Library of Congress. Of the 440 photographs in what was called "Not an Ostrich: and Other Images from America's Library," 48 were Highsmith's. For a documentary movie that accompanied the exposition, a crew followed Highsmith "on the road" in Clarksdale, Mississippi and elsewhere a year earlier, in 2017.
  The exhibit's title was borrowed from a 1930 photograph in the national library's collection of a rare, fluffy-feathered goose held by an actress at a Madison Square Garden poultry show, thought to be taken by an unnamed photographer in the employ of the Underwood & Underwood Co. that produced stereograph views.
  
  In what the Annenberg museum described as "a captivating conversation," Highsmith was the featured speaker at an "Iris Nights" lecture series presentation, conducted by curator Tucker, of "the beauty, humor, and humanity of America." They discussed Highsmith's "decades-long project to photograph America with images from all 50 states. The conversation also covered her decision to donate all of her images from the project to the Library of Congress, her experiences 'on the road,' [she had just completed a study of Arizona and was headed to the states of Washington, Oregon, New York, and Rhode Island], and the influence of other trailblazing women photographers, such as Dorothea Lange and Frances Benjamin Johnston, both of whom have inspired Highsmith." 
  In a review of the exhibit by the online LensCulture contemporary-photography magazine, Gena Williams wrote, "Juxtapositions are an important part of Not an Ostrich. One wall features Carol Highsmith's gleaming (and often scenic) images of Americana. 'Highsmith's view of America is a positive one. She has an eye for beauty,' [curator] Tucker says, comparing her work to photographers such as Ansel Adams." The Lensculture review also published four of Highsmith's photographs, including one of a giant, lighted "MOM" artistic installation taken at the 2009 Burning Man "community and art" celebration in Black Rock Desert, Nevada.
caption: Motel neon in Arizona
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