Her work documents the landscapes, architecture, and people of the rural and urban United States in a decades-long nationwide study, in progress since the 1980s.

Since 2010, Highsmith has toured multiple states per year to create a broad pictorial record of the country in the 21st century, a series that she expects to complete in 2026.

Her mother's family were planters descending from the Puritan colonist Thomas Carter and owned a plantation near Wentworth, North Carolina.

[3] In an hour-long interview with C-SPAN founder and host Brian Lamb on July 17, 2011,[2] Highsmith spoke extensively of her childhood in Minneapolis and her summers in the South with her North Carolina "granny" and Atlanta, Georgia "grandmother," who went by that title alone.

We'd have to stay overnight in dingy tourist courts or rented rooms above the kinds of old service stations I love to photograph today.

Upon his deployment to Vietnam in 1966, Carol Highsmith moved to Queens, New York, after securing a position at Peters Griffin Woodward, a national radio "rep" firm in Manhattan.

[6] When Mark Highsmith returned from Vietnam in 1967, he was assigned to Fort Bragg, and the couple briefly moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina.

As Carol was driving to Philadelphia from Atlantic City, the radio station to which she was listening broadcast a devastating news item, that Mark Highsmith, a young, aspiring artist, had committed suicide by gun in his studio.

In 1976, Highsmith moved to Washington, D.C., and spent six years as a senior account executive for another market leader, radio station WMAL while taking classes at American University, also paid for by her employer, ABC.

[8] Highsmith worked in sales for the radio station, and in the 1970s, earned a station-paid trip to the Soviet Union, then a closed society and a client gave her a Pentax K1000 camera, the only one she owned.

[9] She was taught at the Corcoran under Frank DiPerna, who assigned each class member to photograph a model in an unusual location in metropolitan Washington.

[15][12] Highsmith's experience photographing the Willard inspired her to follow Johnson to document life across the United States,[9][14] including to preserve a historic record.

[12] After the Willard was restored as a grand hotel and reopened in 1986, it displayed an extensive exhibit of Highsmith and Johnston's work in an alcove off the "Peacock Alley" corridor.

[16] In 2006, the American Institute of Architects held four-month comparative exhibit of Highsmith and Johnston's work called "Two Windows on the Willard"; like another AIA one-person exhibit of Highsmith's work, titled "Structures of our Times: 31 Buildings That Changed Modern Life" in 2002, the "Two Windows" study traveled to several locations across the country.

Landphair would soon be the principal writer of books featuring Highsmith's work as well as the historian, trip planner, driver, grip, and, as he put it, "Man Friday" on dozens of the couple's photography expeditions throughout the United States.

[22] In a 2015 interview, Highsmith said that she considered her documentation of "living history and built environment" to be an "indestructible record of our vast nation, including sites that are fast fading, even disappearing, in the wake of growth, development, and decay.

[29] Photographs include ordinary people and everyday sites as well as soaring architecture, natural landscapes, national parks and monuments, Civil War battlefields, and engineering marvels.

[30] Highsmith's first work, Pennsylvania Avenue: America's Main Street, was published by the American Institute of Architects' AIA Press in 1988.

[32] That same year, Highsmith and Landphair collaborated on Deep in the Heart, a book about Houston, Texas, financed by that city's International Protocol Alliance.

And Highsmith collaborated with architectural writer Dixie Legler on Historic Bridges of Maryland, published by that state's department of transportation.

[33] In 2007, Highsmith photographed, and author Ryan Coonerty described, 52 monuments and other public sites in a National Geographic book Etched in Stone.

[42] America Restored detailed two restoration projects in each state, including the extensive renovations of the Fordyce Bathhouse in Hot Springs, Arkansas; the Sheraton Palace Hotel in San Francisco; Rockwood Manor House in Wilmington, Delaware; Georgia's Jekyll Island Historic District; the covered bridges of Rush County, Indiana; Parlange Plantation in Louisiana; Broome County, New York's, carousels; and the Battleship Texas in Houston.

[43] On commission from the National Park Service, Highsmith photographed homes, personal belongings, and collections of four presidents (Lincoln, Eisenhower, Truman, and Theodore Roosevelt) as well as poet Carl Sandburg, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Confederate commander Robert E. Lee, African-American businesswoman and teacher Maggie Walker, the pioneer American nurse, Clara Barton, and the Nez Perce American Indian Nation.

"[47] Highsmith sometimes documents buildings in various stages of renewal for contractors, architects, and developer: American Photographers magazine commented in 1989 on Highsmith's images: "Shooting enormous spaces in uncertain lighting conditions, her large format images reveal high quality and fine detail, capturing the splendor of the subject matter, be it a building in the midst of destruction or the elegance of a formal room.

The collection emphasizes what Highsmith calls "Disappearing America," including 200 shots taken along U.S. Route 66 in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma.

By removing copyright restrictions from her photographs, Highsmith is engaged in the important work of growing a robust commons built on gratitude and usability; her singular archive at the Library of Congress is a testament to one woman's passion and generosity.

[61] Lange is remembered for her fieldwork for the federal Farm Security Administration among migrant workers and other dispossessed families during the Great Depression of the 1930s;[62] Highsmith returned to the subject decades later, photographing surviving shacks in the Weedpatch "Okie" camp in Kern County, California, that was the setting for much of John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath.