Colorado Springs, CO Photo - A beer-drinking, guitar-playing"Muffler Man" cowboy-

A beer-drinking, guitar-playing "Muffler Man" cowboy at the Copperhead Road Bar in Colorado Springs, Colorado. This oversized cowpoke has nothing directly to do with automobile mufflers, but the roadside attraction is inspired by a series of large moulded fiberglass sculptures that were placed as advertising icons, especially across the western United States, in the early days of travel across long-distance, two-lane highways.

Carol M. Highsmith (born 1946) is a photographer, author, and publisher who has photographed all 50 of the United States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico for 30 years. She specializes in documenting architecture, ranging from the monumental to the everyday and whimsical. Highsmith is donating her life ’s work of more than 100,000 images, copyright-free, to the Library of Congress, which established a rare one-person archive. Out of 14 million images, the Carol M. Highsmith collection is featured in the top six alongside of Mathew Brady and Dorethea Lange.

Credit line: Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.