C. B. Waite

Charles Betts Waite (December 19, 1861 – March 22, 1927) was an American photographer who worked in Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century. He signed his work C. B. Waite, and his full name is often mistakenly stated as Charles Burlingame Waite.

Personal life and career Men on Horses with Mountain in Background, ca. 1896-1913, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University Born on December 19, 1861, in Ohio (raised in Plymouth, Ohio). to William and Ann (née Dawson) Waite. (Ann Waite was deceased by 1907.) Charles Betts Waite moved to California by June 1881, when he was working with photographer Henry Ellis Coonley in the San Diego region. In the 1890s, Waite's photographs of Southern California ranches and landscapes appeared in the magazine Land of Sunshine, and he was contracted by railroad companies to provide views of Arizona and New Mexico. Waite's only child, a daughter, was born in 1885.

Waite retained his American citizenship, traveling to the United States regularly from 1897 to 1918. Later that year, Waite moved back to Los Angeles,

Works Tlaquichero extracting juice from a cactus for pulque, ca. 1900. Waite's photographs of the southwestern United States and Mexico can be seen in a number of collections, including the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens; Princeton University Library's Collections of Western Americana; the Latin American Library of Tulane University; the Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin; the Eugene P. Lyle, Jr. Photographs, University of Oregon; the DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University; and at the Tomás Rivera Library at University of California, Riverside.

Waite's work has appeared in exhibitions, including "Mexican Life and Culture During the Porfiriato: The Photography of C.B. Waite, 1898-1913," at the Southwest Museum, Los Angeles (1991) and "Mexico: From Empire to Revolution" at the Getty Institute (2000-2001). Some of his photographs are represented in the digital collection "A Nation Emerges: 65 Years of Photography in Mexico".

Critical assessment of Waite's work focuses on his representation of poverty in Mexican society in relation to the industrialization and modernization projects of the Porfirio Díaz government.

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