This week on Prodibi Pixel Magazine, we go on a visual journey to an immense and highly diverse country most of us already know: The United States.
Carol Highsmith is often called "America's Photographer" for a good reason, she has spent 38 years of her life documenting exhaustively all States that composed the US for the Library of Congress. With a rare precision and beauty, she photographs with great clarity the look and feel of people and places across this nation.
Discover her story and pictures in high resolution, all powered by Prodibi!
Carol McKinney Highsmith is an American photographer, author, and publisher who has photographed in all the states of the United States to document exhaustively the landscape, architecture, urban, and rural life of the country. Her work is a precise record of the early 21st century life of this nation.
Carol's relationship with a camera and photography started in the '70s with travels to far-away places for which one of her friends lent her a first camera, a Pentax K1000. At this time, her approach was the simplest: enjoying the exotic new world and clicking away. It turned out the results, snapped photographs from Kiev to eastern Siberia, were already pretty good which determined her to pursue this newly found passion.
Carol decided to get her photography education at the Corcoran school of art in Washington, D.C. Her first assignment? To photograph a model in an unusual place. Carol's choice was the former "Hotel of Presidents", an hotel close to the White House which was at this time an adandoned ruin with plans for destruction. Her mostly black-and-white photos taken there reaffirmed her eye for detail and solidified her interest in photographic art.
Carol M. Highsmith was directly influenced by two female photographers: Frances Benjamin Johnston and Dorothea Lange. "It was there that I first saw the astonishing images of Frances Benjamin Johnston, a pioneer female photographer who had also shot in the Willard Hotel 75 years earlier", says Carol.
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But there is more to the story. Frances had one particularity, she had donated her life’s photography work to the Library of Congress. Inspired by her work and generosity, Carol immediately decided to follow the same path and informed the Library's Prints & Photographs Division's curators that she intended to do likewise, with no stipulations or restrictions, just as Frances did.
Almost 40 years later, Carol's collection at the national library has grown to 100 thousand images, taken in every state. This great act of generosity is a testament to Carol's passion for capturing time.
###To see more of Carol's work: Carol's website Instagram Facebook
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