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Charles Betts Waite (December 19, 1861 – March 22, 1927) was an American photographer best known for his extensive documentation of Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century as well as for his detailed documentation of Southern California’s landscapes, architecture, and development. Though he signed his work as C. B. Waite, he is sometimes incorrectly identified as Charles Burlingame Waite. Working primarily during the regime of Porfirio Díaz, Waite produced a vast photographic corpus that captured the landscapes, architecture, people, and industrial modernization of Mexico during a period of profound transformation. His images, often published in books, periodicals, and postcards, remain a vital visual record of Mexican society prior to the Revolution.

Waite was born in Ohio to William and Ann (née Dawson) Waite, and by 1881 had relocated to California, where he worked with San Diego photographer Henry Ellis Coonley. Over the next decade, he developed a reputation as a landscape photographer, producing views of Southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico. His early work appeared in Land of Sunshine magazine and was contracted by railroad companies eager to promote the American Southwest. By the mid-1890s, he was operating his own studio in Los Angeles, and around 1896, he married Alice M. Cooley, with whom he had one daughter.

In 1897, Waite moved to Mexico City and established a studio that would remain active for over two decades. Immersed in Porfirian elite circles, he photographed public works, private estates, archaeological sites, and rural villages with equal attentiveness. His clients included government officials, scientific expeditions, newspapers, and the Sonora News Company, through which many of his images circulated as postcards. Alongside contemporaries such as Winfield Scott, Ralph Carmichael, and Percy S. Cox, Waite formed part of a vibrant community of foreign photographers in pre-revolutionary Mexico. His work often reflected both the idealized vision of a modernizing nation and the stark realities of rural poverty and social inequality.

Waite traveled extensively across the country, producing photographs of railroads, public parks, and indigenous communities. He purchased 17,000 acres of land in Veracruz, anticipating development along a trans-isthmus railway corridor between Salina Cruz and Coatzacoalcos. This property, a frequent subject of his photographs, was later lost during the upheavals of the Mexican Revolution. Though he remained an American citizen and returned periodically to the United States, Waite lived in Mexico until 1923, when his wife died in Mexico City. He returned to Los Angeles shortly thereafter and died there in 1927.

Today, Waite's photographs are held in numerous institutional collections, including those of the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University, the Huntington Library, and the University of New Mexico. His images have been featured in major exhibitions, notably 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).