Femme Annamite, Saïgon, Cochinchine
1866
Medium
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Dimensions
20 x 16.7 cm (7 7/8 x 6 9/16 in.)
Classification
Photographs
Department
Photographs
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005
Accession Number
2005.100.501 (2)
Tags
Art Historical Context
**Femme Annam, Saïgon, Cochinchine** (1866) is a striking portrait by Émile Gsell, a French photographer who documented life in colonial Vietnam. Capturing an Annamite (Vietnamese) woman in, then part of the French protectorate of Cochinchine this image reflects the early years of French Indochina. Saigon had fallen to French forces just seven years earlier in 1859, marking start of colonial expansion, and Gsell's work often served as visual records for European audiences, blending ethnography with portraiture. Printed as an albumen silver print from a glass negative—a dominant 19th-century t...
About the Artist
Emile Gsell · 1838–1879
Emile Gsell (1838–1879) was a French photographer who became one of the earliest Western photographers to document Southeast Asia, particularly the ancient temples of Angkor in Cambodia. Born in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines in Alsace, France, Gsell traveled to Indochina in the 1860s, establishing a photographic studio in Saigon (present-day Ho Chi Minh City) that became a base for his documentary expedi...