Kachemak Bay, on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula.
Highsmith took this photo from her hotel window in Homer.
Some photographers chase the extraordinary. Carol M. Highsmith has spent much of her career photographing something that may prove even more valuable: the ordinary world before it disappears.
A courthouse standing on a town square. A weathered motel sign beside an old highway. A grain elevator rising over a small Midwestern community. A storefront, a church, a ranch, a city skyline, a roadside attraction, a factory worker, a festival, or a nearly forgotten building that might not survive another generation.
Individually, such photographs can seem like simple records of places.
Taken together, they become a portrait of a nation.
For more than four decades, Highsmith has traveled across the United States creating one of the most ambitious photographic records of contemporary America ever attempted. Her work has taken her to all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, documenting both celebrated landmarks and places most Americans will never see.
More remarkably, Highsmith has chosen not to keep that enormous archive for herself.
She has given it to the American people.
An Unusual Path to Photography
Carol M. Highsmith was born Carol Louise McKinney in North Carolina in 1946 and grew up largely in Minneapolis, while spending summers with family in the South.
Photography was not initially her profession.
Highsmith first built a successful career in broadcasting. By her thirties, however, photography had become increasingly important to her, and she studied at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C.
Then an assignment changed her life’s direction.
In the early 1980s, Washington’s historic Willard Hotel was undergoing an enormous restoration.
Only a short distance from the White House, the Willard had once been one of the nation’s great hotels. Presidents, politicians, diplomats, and other prominent Americans had passed through its rooms. But after closing in 1968, the building deteriorated badly.
Highsmith was hired to photograph its restoration.
The project taught her how to photograph architecture in extraordinary detail, but something else happened inside the old hotel that would shape the remainder of her career.
She discovered Frances Benjamin Johnston.
Following Frances
Decades earlier, pioneering photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston had photographed the Willard extensively.
Johnston, born in 1864, was one of the first American women to establish a major career in photography. Her subjects ranged from presidents and prominent Americans to schools, historic buildings, industrial sites, Southern architecture and everyday life.
When they restored the Willard, Johnston’s old photographs proved remarkably useful. In places where architectural plans and other records had disappeared, photographs taken generations earlier preserved information that otherwise would have been lost.
Highsmith saw firsthand what documentary photography could accomplish.
A photograph could be beautiful.
But it could also become evidence.
It could preserve architectural details after a building changed. It could record a landscape before development transformed it. It could show future generations what a street looked like, what people wore, where they worked, what they built, and how they lived.
Johnston had also made another decision that impressed Highsmith.
She gave her photographic archive to the Library of Congress.
Highsmith decided to follow her example.
Building a Visual Record of America
Highsmith began photographing Washington extensively, including historic buildings, neighborhoods, embassies, government structures, and restoration projects.
But Washington was only the beginning.
Her camera increasingly turned toward America itself.
She photographed cities and small towns, farms and factories, mountains and deserts, historic buildings and modern skyscrapers.
She photographed diners.
She photographed neon signs.
She photographed county courthouses, libraries, theaters and churches.
She photographed highways, barns, bridges, ranches, hotels and storefronts.
She photographed festivals and fairs.
She photographed the wonderfully strange roadside attractions Americans have built beside their highways for generations.
Those subjects matter because many won’t survive.
Buildings are demolished.
Businesses close.
Highways are rerouted.
Signs disappear.
Downtowns are redeveloped.
Farms become subdivisions.
Factories become apartments.
People die.
Eventually, even things that once seemed permanent become hard to remember.
Highsmith photographs them while they are still here.
The America Project
By the beginning of the 21st century, that mission had grown into something far more ambitious: a systematic photographic survey of the United States.
Highsmith began an extensive state-by-state effort to document America as it exists in her own time.
It inevitably invites comparison with one of the great documentary projects in American history.
During the Great Depression, photographers working for the Farm Security Administration and later the Office of War Information created an extraordinary visual record of the United States.
Dorothea Lange photographed migrant families.
Walker Evans documented Southern tenant farmers, buildings, and streets.
Russell Lee photographed workers, communities and daily life.
Arthur Rothstein, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano and others traveled through an America experiencing enormous economic and social change.
Their photographs were created largely to document conditions during their own era.
Today they are windows into a vanished world.
Highsmith understood that the America around us today will someday be just as vanished.
Her project approaches the country from a different time and with a different visual language, frequently using vivid color rather than the black-and-white photography associated with the Depression-era documentary tradition.
But the underlying idea is remarkably similar.
Document the country now.
Let the future decide what proves important.
Beauty Without Ignoring the Record
Highsmith’s photographs generally do not have the bleak quality associated with some Depression-era documentary photography.
Pioneer buildings at the Historic Arkansas Museum in Little Rock
Her view of America tends to be bright, precise, and often optimistic.
She is attracted to architecture, color, symmetry and visual character.
A brilliant neon motel sign against a blue sky interests her.
So does an abandoned building.
A perfectly restored courthouse can be important.
So can the fading commercial strip beyond it.
Her photographs frequently possess considerable beauty, but they rarely become abstract studies in which the identity of the place disappears.
Highsmith is documenting something.
Place matters.
Names matter.
Location matters.
Architecture matters.
Context matters.
That distinction is important.
A landscape photographer might photograph a barn primarily because the light falling across it is beautiful.
Highsmith may photograph the same barn because someday there may be no barn.
September 11
Her archive also records moments whose historic importance was immediately obvious.
Highsmith photographed New York’s World Trade Center shortly before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Following the attacks, she published World Trade Center: Tribute and Remembrance.
She also photographed reactions near the Flight 93 crash site in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Those photographs illustrate another unpredictable quality of documentary work.
A photographer can never know which photograph will someday become historically important.
An ordinary photograph taken today can become extraordinary tomorrow simply because the world changes.
Giving the Photographs Away
Perhaps the most unusual part of Highsmith’s career is what she has done with the photographs after making them.
Beginning in 1992, she started donating her work to the Library of Congress.
Not simply prints.
Not merely a small representative collection.
She began giving the Library the photographic record of her career.
She also dedicated the photographs for copyright-free public use.
The Carol M. Highsmith Archive at the Library of Congress now contains tens of thousands of images, with more still being added.
That decision fundamentally changes the collection’s importance.
Highsmith’s photographs are not locked in a commercial archive waiting for someone to pay a licensing fee.
Historians can use them.
Teachers can use them.
Students can use them.
Museums can use them.
Writers can use them.
Publishers can use them.
Local historians searching for an image of a building or community can use them.
And someone decades from now researching what an American town looked like in 2012 or 2020 may discover exactly the image they need.
The Details We Do Not Know We Need
That may ultimately be Highsmith’s greatest contribution.
Historians frequently discover that the most useful part of an old photograph is something the original photographer barely noticed.
Someone photographed a parade in 1910.
A century later, a researcher enlarges the photograph to learn what business occupied the building behind the parade.
A family posed in front of their house in 1935.
Decades later, someone studying rural architecture examines the porch.
A photographer recorded a downtown street because the courthouse was interesting.
Eighty years later, historians study the automobiles, utility poles, storefront signs and pavement.
Every photograph contains information beyond its intended subject.
Highsmith’s enormous collection preserves those accidental details by the thousands.
That is why photographing ordinary places matters.
A Photographer Working for People She Will Never Meet
Highsmith’s project has an unusual generosity.
Most of the people who may ultimately benefit from it have not yet been born.
Imagine someone in the year 2126 wanting to know what an American highway looked like in 2016.
Or what businesses lined the streets of a small Texas town.
Or how a courthouse square looked before redevelopment.
Or what remained of Route 66.
Or what people wore at a county fair.
Or what a once-common roadside motel looked like before the last examples disappeared.
Highsmith has been photographing answers to questions no one has yet thought to ask.
That places her within a long American documentary tradition extending from photographers such as Frances Benjamin Johnston through the Farm Security Administration photographers and into the digital age.
Their subjects and styles differ.
Their eras differ.
But they share a fundamental idea.
The present is already becoming history.
Someone needs to record it.
Leaving America to America
Highsmith could have built an enormous proprietary photographic archive.
Instead, she chose another model.
She photographed America and gave the photographs back to America.
That decision may ultimately prove as important as the photographs themselves.
The Library of Congress describes the Highsmith archive as an ongoing collection. It already contains tens of thousands of photographs and is intended to continue growing.
Some show famous American landmarks photographed millions of times.
Others show buildings, streets, communities, and roadside curiosities that might otherwise leave remarkably little visual record.
Those may someday be the most valuable photographs of all.
Carol M. Highsmith has spent much of her life traveling through the United States with a camera, recording what she finds.
Not because everything she photographs is historic.
But because anything might become history.
And history has a habit of becoming important only after it is gone.
