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A rare and atmospheric early photograph of La Jolla’s ephemeral sandstone arch known locally as the Fisherman’s Bridge, taken by the prominent Los Angeles-based landscape photographer Charles B. Waite during the peak of his Southern California period, circa 1893–1899.
The image captures the natural bridge from the water level, looking north-northeast toward Goldfish Point, with the Pacific surf crashing into the base of the arch and rushing through the tidepool chamber beneath its eastern pier. The coastal bluffs rise beyond, still untouched by the speculative development that would soon transform La Jolla from an artists’ retreat into a resort suburb of San Diego.
Fisherman’s Bridge, as depicted here, was short-lived even by the standards of California’s mutable sandstone coast. Period guidebooks note that local anglers favored the span for casting directly into the kelp beds, but its precarious formation succumbed to storm erosion by the early 1900s. Only the twin stumps of its supports remained by the time later photographers like C.C. Pierce recorded the site. Waite’s negative number, 413, places this image in a sequence of views he made along the San Diego coastline in the mid-1890s, shortly before he sold his Los Angeles studio and relocated to Mexico City, where he gained national prominence.
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).
![[Downtown San Diego Embarcadero Waterfront, Present-Day Seaport Village, Showing Spreckels' Wharf and Santa Fe Railroad]](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/96822.jpg)