Monroe County, Alabama, May 2010, by Carol M. Highsmith, via The George F. Landegger Collection of Alabama Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The infrared treatment of the late spring scene gives it a wintery appearance.
Highsmith has specialized in photographing America’s architectural heritage. She has donated the rights to her work to the Library of Congress for copyright free access for all.
“Rockefeller Center, New York City, planted with azaleas,” April 1945, by Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc., via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Samuel Herman Gottscho worked as a traveling lace and fabric salesman before becoming a commercial photographer at the age of 50. He specialized in architecture, but also regularly contributed to New York Times articles on wildflowers. He was awarded the New York Botanical Garden’s Distinguished Service Medal in 1967 for his photographs of plants.
The Library of Congress holds 29,000 of his images in the Gottscho-Schleisner Collection (William Schleisner was his son-in-law and partner).
“Necropolis de Colon, Havana, Cuba,” 2010, by Carol Highsmith, via the Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The Cementerio de Cristóbal Colón [Christopher Columbus] was founded in 1876. The 140-acre cemetery is located in the Vedado neighbourhood of Havana, Cuba, and holds more than 500 family vaults, mausoleums, and chapels.
Carol M. Highsmith is a contemporary photographer who has specialized in documenting architecture and landscape — high and low — in all 50 American states. Her influences are Frances Benjamin Johnston and Dorothea Lange. You can read more about her life here.
Highsmith is donating her life’s work — more than 100,000 images — copyright-free to the Library of Congress. Many of her images are printed in the distinctive black and white style shown here.
A garden should make you feel you’ve entered privileged space – a place not just set apart but reverberant – and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.
enclos*ure 