Briquet, Granat, and Waite Album of Commercial Photographs of Mexico City and Its Environs

Charles Betts (C. B.) Waite was an American photographer born in Akron, Ohio, on December 19, 1861. Waite was active during the turn of the century and is best known for his images of the American Southwest and Mexico. Around 1881, when Waite was twenty, he moved to southern California while working for Henry Ellis Coonley taking photographs of landscapes around the San Diego area. These images appeared in a magazine titled Land of Sunshine, which led to commissions with railroad companies to capture similar landscape images of Arizona and New Mexico. In 1897, Waite moved to Mexico City and established his own studio where he continued to take landscape images of the Mexican countryside, as well as Mexican city-life and images of the upper-class, including President Porfirio Diaz's inner circle. Waite lived in Mexico, regularly travelling back to the United States, until 1923, when his wife, Alice Cooley Waite, died. He moved to Los Angeles, California, and lived there until his death on March 22, 1927.

Abel Briquet, also known as Alfred Briquet, was a French photographer born December 30, 1833. He practiced and taught photography in France but closed his studio in 1865 for unknown reasons. At some point between 1865 and 1876 he immigrated to Mexico, where he is believed to be one of the first commercial photographers in Mexico. He received a commission to photograph the Mexican National Railway between Veracruz and Mexico City in 1876, and opened his own studio in 1885.

Jacob Granat was born in 1871 in Lemberg (today Lviv), a city in Western Ukraine, at the time part of the Austrian empire. Little is known about Jacob Granat as a photographer, with at least one historian speculating that he outsourced his images, with some possibly taken by Guillermo Kahlo, and that Granat was merely the distributor of the images. Granat moved to Mexico in 1900, setting up a shop selling luggage and souvenirs in Mexico City. In 1906, Jacob Granat sold his shop and opened the first movie theater in the city, Salon Rojo. In June 1912, he was one of the founders, and the first president, of the first Jewish charitable organization in Mexico, Alianza Beneficencia Monte Sinai. He sold his theater and moved to Austria in the 1920s. He died at Auschwitz in 1943.