Emile Gsell

Émile Gsell (30 Dec 1838, Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, Haut-Rhin, France — 16 Oct. 1879, Saigon [now Ho Chi Minh City,Vietnam]) was a self-taught French photographer who produced among the earliest photographs of Angkor Wat when he joined the Mekong Exploration Expedition led by Ernest Doudart de Lagrée in May 1866 as a young Navy sailor. Scottish photographer John Thomson had preceded him by a few weeks.

Recommended for his photographic skills to other French explorers of Indochina, Gsell joined the Mekong Expedition on 8 May 1866, reaching Angkor where he stayed until 1st July. Back to Saigon, he left the army, becoming one of the first professional photographer in French Indochina, listed in the Annuaire de la Cochinchine 1867 as ‘Gsell Photographe, Rue Catinat’ [even if his studio was located on rue Rigault de Genouilly.]

Less detailed and extensive than Scottish photographer John Thomson’s, his photographic work on Angkor met public acclaim after the minister of the Navy and commander of the French army in Cochinna Admiral Rigault de Genouilly presented an album of some fifteen of his Angkor photographs to Empress Eugénie in 1867. In her Travel Album of her 1883 – 4 journey to Phnom Penh and Angkor, American art collector and socialite Isabella Stewart Gardner pasted several photographs by Émile Gsell, and the printed catalogue of Angkor-related photos made available by his studio.

1) 2 photoprints by Gsell pasted on **Isabella Stewart Gardner**’s Cambodia Travel Album, 1883 – 1884, p 23. 2) At the end of the part on Cambodia, a catalogue of Gsell Studio listing 158 photos of Angkor. [source: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Online Documents].

Louis Delaporte, who had been with Gsell in the 1866 Mekong Mission — indirectly criticizing him for only photographing Angkor Wat at the time -, noted in a letter to his parents dated Saigon, 2 July 1873: “Notre ancien photographe, qui y est retourné dernièrement à ses frais, né demande qu’à y revenir avec moi, et j’espère obtenir du gouverneur, l’autorisation de l’emmener.” [“Our former photographer, who recently returned there at his own expense, is only too happy to come back with me, and I hope to be granted permission from the governor to take him.” [see Julie Philippe 2015, op. cit, p 554]. The official authorization never came, and it seems that after numbering 163 of his Angkor photographs in 1875, Gsell never went back to the Khmer temples.

Gsell took part in the 1871 diplomatic mission to Siam via Phnom Penh and Battambang led by French officer Charles Paul Brosssard de Corbigny in January and February 1871. In July that year, he seems to have accompanied the governor of Cochinchina Marie Jules Dupré in his visit to Angkor, the same way he had photographed the Angkor trip of Spanish ambassador to China and Annam Adolfo Paxtot y Achaval, who was also the Spanish envoy to the Kingdom of Siam, in April 1870.

Émile Gsell documented archaelogical sites, the Royal Court of Cambodia, dancers and musicians, commoners from Cambodia and Vietnam, the daily life of Cambodian, Vietnamese and ethnic communities. With another photographer, Jean-Baptiste Pellissier, he covered the fall of Hanoi to French troops in 1873, and later the 1875 Brossard de Corbigny mission to Hue, as well as, in 1876 – 7, the expedition on the Red River led by the French consul at Hanoi Alexandre Le Jumeau de Kergaradec (1841 – 1894), he was able to photograph life scenes of northern Vietnam. He was awarded a bronze medal at Paris 1878 Exposition Universelle, one year before his death.

Five years earlier, he had been granted a medal of merit at the 1 May- 2 Nov. 1873 Wiener Weltausstellung [World Exhibition] at Vienna’s Prater — with 35 participating countries and some 53,000 exhibitors, attracting about 7 million visitors — for his two albums produced in 1866 – 1870 — Ruines d’Angkor and Moeurs, coutumes et types annamites et cambodgiens [The mores, customs, and types of the Annamite and Cambodian people”. The second one, kept at the Weltmuseum Wien, has been posted online in 2025 [201 photos and objects in the repository as of October 2026.] That was three years after the bloody French-Prussian War, during which Gsell, an Alsatian, had opted to keep his French citizenship as his home region had been annexed by Germany in 1871, and would remain occupied until 1918.

A third album — a compilation of the two previous ones without Angkor views but with a few additional views of Hanoi — was printed in Saigon around 1877 – 1879 under the title Cambodge, and has been digitized and made available online by Universite Provence Cote d’Azur [update September 2026]. There was also the already mentioned album of 27 of his photos made into an album offered to Empress Eugénie when she visited Saigon in 1867, and an undated, unsigned photo-album attributed to Gsell by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France under the working title [Voyage de l’Inde à l’Indochine], which seems to have been scrambled together by Gsell’s friend and colleague Hippolyte Arnoux after his death — Arnoux signed most of his photos ‘H. Arnoud Port-Said’ -, not to mention the countless authentic photos by Gsell published in the magazine Le Tour du Monde and/or transposed as engravings and woodcuts to illustrate books (notably Francis Garnier’s ones) and periodicals.

Gsell was eager to help visiting photographers in Saigon. For instance, Bangkok- and later Singapore-based Prussian photographer August Sachtler (c. 1839 – 1873) spent four months in Saigon starting from August 1866 — Gsell had returned from Angkor early July -, supervising the distribution of his photos of Bangkok, Penang and Singapore by Saigon-based, Hong-Kong born photographer Pun-Lun (璸綸) [see below] and “making use of the photographic studio of French Émile Gsell” [J. Bautze 2022, op. cit., p. 357 – 8]. In 1869, German photographer Wilhelm Burger (1844 – 1920) spent a few days in Saigon, buying negatives from unnamed dealers and probably visiting Gsell’s studio [see T. Bennett 2020, op. cit., p. 41]. As for famed Scottish photographer John Thomson, he worked from December 1867 to February 1868 in Saigon, Cholon and parts of Cochinchina, but we have no evidence the two men who had put back Angkor at the center of the world imaginations met in person.

1) August Sachtler, Vietnamese official, taken at Gsell studio in Saigon c.1866, albumen print carte de visite. [Terry Bennett Collection, repr. in T. Bennett, Early Photographers in Vietnam, 2020, p. 31]. 2) “Jeunes filles” [Young Girls], print of a photograph taken in Phnom Penh by Emile Gsell, 1866 – 1877. [marked ‘Ph. 268’, code number VF 268 in Collection of Gsell Photos, Volksmuseum Wien].

Gsell’s photographs were marketed from 1876 by Auguste Nicolier, a merchant of chemicals and photographic supplies in Saigon , and after his death by “O. Wegener” — could it be the Swedish-French photographer Otto Wegener (20 Jan. 1849, Helsingborg — 4 Feb. 1924, Paris 8), would had volunteered into the French troops during the 1870 French-Prussian and would become the portraitist of celebrities such as Isadora Duncan and Marcel Proust ? — and a Vidal or Salin-Vidal (d. on 4 Dec. 1883). For some time, Gsell’s photos were circulated by an Austrian photographer from Vienna, Max Martin, who had opened his own photographic studio in Haiphong and claimed he was the photographer to “SM le roi des Siam, SAI l’Archiduc d’Autriche et SAR le Duc de Gênes.” [‘to His Majesty The King of the Siam [sic], His Imperial Highness the Archiduke of Austria, and His Royal Highness the Duke of Genova”. French photographer Pierre Dieulefils (1862 – 1937) thought he was an impostor, and the fact is he forged several photos of Angkor by Gsell to claim them to his name [see Kiên Minh Lêh 2025, op.cit., p. 462; J. Bautzen 2012, op. cit., p 313.]

1) A collage of **portraits** by Gsell used as business card by his studio, c. 1870 [source: Terry Bennett’s collection, in Terry Bennett, *Early Photography in Vietnam,* p. 70.] 2) Cochinchine et Cambodge, photo-album of 26 prints of Angkor views by Gsell, presented to Empress Eugenie of France by Admiral Renault de Genouilly [Gilman Collection, donated to the Met in March 2005]. 3) Gsell’s Angkor catalogue no. 40, recycled by M. Martin, Haiphong, with his signature “M. Martin”, lower left (h. 19.3 x 24.3cm). [Collection: Günter Heil., repr. in J. Bautze 2012, op. cit., p, 314 (Fig. 24.9) ]

Nowadays, Emile Gsell’s work is seen as a major photographic source on the history of pre-colonial and early colonial Cambodia and Vietnam, in particular Saigon (Ho-Chi-Minh-Ville), along with the photographs by Pun Lun (1864 – 1900) [1], Aurélien Pestel (1855 – 1897) and Võ An Ninh (1907 – 2009). Modern Vietnamese historians state that Emile Gsell was the first photograph ever to portray a woman in Tonkin.

As most of photographers of his time, Gsell never allowed his portrait to be taken. However, researcher Patrick Kersalé claimed he was able to identify Gsell in a group photography taken in front of Angkor Wat during the Delaporte Mission in 1873.

As Vietnamese independent researcher Nguyễn Ðức Hiệp reported in 2014,

in December 2007, an album comprising about 350 photographs by Gsell was brought to auction by Galerie Bassenge, Berlin [2]. It included prints from negatives marked by Gsell as well as photographs with notes below them in pencil. All images of Angkor had printed captions mounted below. [Nguyen Duc Hiep & Ellen Takata (tr.), “Photography in Vietnam from the End of the Nineteenth Century to the Start of the Twentieth, by Nguyễn Ðức Hiệp”, Trans Asia Photography (2014) 4 – 2.]

[1] Pun Lun (1864 – 1900), who came from Hong Kong, was a renowned photographer who operated photography studios in Saigon, Fuzhou, and Singapore. Some of the photographs taken by his studio in Saigon rank among the earliest images of the city [see “Chuyện ít biết về Sài Gòn xưa: Những nhiếp ảnh gia đầu tiên”, 2Saigon.vn blog post, 15 Aug. 2016].

[2] In the 2020s, Bassenge Auction House has auctioned several original prints attributed to Gsell, with his photos of Angkor labelled “Gsell, Emile and Others
(1838 — 1879), Views of Angkor Wat and Siam” (sic).

The sole photographic document (or picture in general) depicting Emile Gsell? 1) On this group photo of “Mission d’exploration des monuments Khmers” (**“Delaporte Mission”**) at Angkor Wat, second half of 1873, the photographer is supposedly sitting with 12 other French members of the expedition, plus a local guide and a monk standing [photo retrieved from a private collection in 2019 by researcher **Patrick Kersalé**]. 2) The same photo touched to highlight Emile Gsell [published by Patrick Kersalé on his blog **Sounds of Angkor**, post updated in March 2026.] 3) Possibly taken around the same time, the same group in the same location on a photograph by Emile Gsell himself. [Private collection, reproduced in Joachim Bautze 2012, op. cit., p. 312 (Fig. 24.6)].

More About Emile Gsell

Olivier Loiseaux, Trésors photographiques de la Société de Géographie. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France/Glénat, 2006.
Joachim K. Bautze, “Émile Gsell (1838 – 79) and Early Photographs of Angkor”, in Connecting Empires and States: Selected Papers from the 13th International Conference of the European Association of Southeast Asian Archaeologists, Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz, Andreas Reinecke & Dominik Bonatz (eds), Singapore, NUS Press, 2012.
Jérome Ghesquière (ed.), La photographie ancienne en Asie (Early Photographs in Asia), Paris, Editions Scala / Musée Guimet, 2016, 128 p. ISBN 9782359881639.
Patrick Kersalé, “A very special relationship with Émile Gsell”, Sounds of Angkor blog [updated 30 March 2026].
Terry Bennett, Early Photography in Vietnam, Folkestone, Renaissance Books, 2020, 404 p. ISBN 978−1−912961−05−4.
Joachim Bautze, “August Sachtler and John Thomson Photographing Siam, 1865 – 1866”, in Decoding Southeast Asian Art, Studies in Honor of Piriya Krairiksh, Narisa Chakrabongse (publs.), Bangkok, River Books, 2022: 354 – 69. ISBN 9786164510661.
Kiên Minh Lêh, “Have your ID ready: citizenship, identification practices, and mobility in colonial Vietnam”, Journal of Visual Culture 24 – 3, Dec. 2025, p. 452 – 72.