Claire Garoutte is a documentary and street photographer based in Seattle, Washington. She is an emeritus associate professor of photography at Seattle University. She taught at the Photographic Center Northwest for 18 years.
She has worked in Cuba since 1994. Her project about Afro-Cuban religion began that year. It led to the book Crossing the Water: A Photographic Path to the Afro-Cuban Spirit World (Duke University Press, 2007), made with Anneke Wambaugh. Her first book was Matter of Trust (Konkursbuch, 1996).
Garoutte and Wambaugh also made Cuba. On a Given Day (Kehrer Verlag, 2025). It has 72 black-and-white photographs of daily life in Cuba. They shoot analog black and white with rangefinder cameras.
