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 (including landscapes, architecture, urban and rural life, and people in their work environments) in all fifty U.S. 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.
Carol Louise McKinney was born to Luther Carlton McKinney and Ruth Ragsdale Carter in Leaksville, North Carolina near the large tobacco farm owned by her maternal grandparents, Yancey Ligon Carter and Mary Elizabeth Morton. Her father was a manufacturer representative and her mother worked for Billy Graham. In an hour-long interview with C-Span founder and host Brian Lamb on July 17, 2011, Highsmith spoke extensively of her childhood in Minneapolis and her summers spent in the South. She and her sister Sara would spend the first half on her maternal grandmother's North Carolina tobacco farm and the second half in a starkly different world of chauffeurs and house servants among the elite of Atlanta, Georgia. Her paternal grandmother, also named Sara McKinney, was a friend of Margaret Mitchell and other society women, she told Lamb. "We'd spend every day at someone's pool or country club," Highsmith said. "Opera played on the radio. Grandmother taught us manners and etiquette – to sit up straight, eat with our mouths closed, hold the soup spoon just so."
Actually, Highsmith continued, her rural "granny" in North Carolina was wealthier than her refined grandmother in Atlanta. "Granny and Granddad owned a large and successful tobacco farm," Highsmith said. "Grandmother and grandfather, had lost everything in two fires and the Great Depression. But grandmother's friends made like nothing had happened. They'd have her to dinner, play bridge and canasta, even take her on cruises to Europe and have their chauffeurs drive her as if she were still part of the aristocracy."
Highsmith told C-Span that the influence of her father, a traveling salesman, and her own annual travels through several states to reach her grandmothers imbued her with a fascination about America, "especially roadside America. The old car in which my mother would drive Sara and me South would break down every year, it seemed, in little towns. We'd have to stay overnight in little motels and above the kinds of old gas stations I love to photograph today."
In February 2012, Carol Highsmith returned to her birth city in North Carolina to record a tape about her childhood experiences that would be played four months later at the opening of the Museum and Archives of Rockingham County (MARC) in Wentworth, North Carolina. The museum's newsletter called it "the journey of a hometown girl." Highsmith's summer trips to her granny's farm "left an indelible memory of carefree days, delicious food, and wonderful times with family and friends," it continued. Highsmith's experiences in rural Rockingham County were chronicled in a lengthy feature story about her life and career in the Greensboro, N.C., News & Record on August 5, 2017. The article, by Dawn DeCwikiel-Kane, included Highsmith's reflection on the significance of her (then) 25-year donation of more than 42,000 images to the Library of Congress: "'It's my legacy,' she said. "But it's our [nation's] legacy.'" The story, entitled "America's Photographer," won a 2017 first-place award in the Profile Feature category in an annual contest sponsored by the North Carolina Press Association.
Carol Highsmith (then McKinney) graduated from Minnehaha Academy in Minneapolis in 1964, then spent a year in college at the now-defunct Parsons College in Fairfield, Iowa. In a 2013 profile of Highsmith, the Minnehaha Academy alumni magazine, the "Arrow," quoted Highsmith:
The 1960s were a magical time. They remind me of what I've read about the liberating, transitional 1920s. We were at the right age to be profoundly affected by the churning changes in our times. Little did we know how profound and lasting would be the effects of the civil rights movement, landing a man on the moon, the rock'n'roll revolution, the Vietnam War and the protests against it, the social and counterculture movement, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Kennedy Brothers. I am the driven, creative, and somewhat unpredictable person I am partly because of those rebellious times, framed against the backdrop of solid, values-oriented Midwest surroundings.
When I attended Minnehaha Academy, I was voted Most Mischievous! Perhaps there's a lesson there—that anyone, even average, fun-loving students, can achieve a life of substance, given determination and half a chance.

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