she was born on the 18 May 1946 in Eden, North Carolina, United States and she is 70 years old.
On her lifelong mission to photograph the entire nation, Carol M. Highsmith estimates she's crossed the U.S. at least 25 times, ocean to ocean. Her trips are always made by car, with a small arsenal of top-of-the-line digital cameras. She keeps her eye especially attuned to the architectural features of America: epic skyscrapers, disappearing roadside barns, utterly mundane office interiors.
Highsmith is sometimes called "America's photographer," and for good reason. Determined to capture all 50 states in exhaustive, obsessive detail—"the nation's most ambitious visual record since the Depression"—she's been donating virtually all of her shots, copyright-free, to the Library of Congress since 1992, where they comprise a rare, one-person archive of some 30,000 images.
Highsmith found her connection to architectural photography in the early 1980s, when, as a night-school student at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, she was given the opportunity to photograph Pennsylvania Avenue's Willard Hotel as it was being restored. The once-splendid Beaux Arts building had fallen into extreme disrepair after it closed in 1968, following years of revenue loss to competitors and fallout from the devastating riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.