Photographs of Southeast Asia. [1866-1879]

ArchivalResource

Gsell, Emile, 1838-1879,. Photographs of Southeast Asia.

Photographs of Southeast Asia. [1866-1879]

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/758394502

The collection includes photographs of rural landscapes; religious and secular buildings, both colonial and indigenous; individual and group portraits; and scenes of daily life. They were taken in Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Images of buildings include views of the temple complex at Angkor, an exterior and an interior view of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception (known as the Notre Dame Basilica) in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), two views of a Vietnamese theater, and several views of colonial buildings or compounds. The seven roughly carte-de-viste-sized studio portaits of Annamite and Tonkinese (Vietnamese) women include two seated women, three semi-nude women, and two female vendors with their wares (these two are in a uncut strip). An eighth portrait is of a male musician. Cabinet card-sized studio portraits include Nguyễn Hữu Dô (the high-ranking Vietnamese court official who was instrumental in the French conquest of Vietnam in the 1880s) standing and wearing numerous medals pinned on his tunic, and one of an older, seated man. Larger exterior portraits depict a soldier, two guards holding lances, and a group of three Buddhist monks. Also included is a portrait of the enthroned King Chulalongkorn (Rama V) in full court dress, taken on the occassion of his second coronation in 1873. Scenes of daily life include riverboats, Cambodian and Vietnamese musicians playing instruments, girls preparing rice for threshing orselling vegetables, a group of men displaying captured and bound caimans, and a street procession with elaborate palenquins. Also included is a photograph of colonial and indigenous men posed on railway cars stopped in an outpost train station.

38 photographic prints : albumen ; 20 x 26.6 cm. or smaller.

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