Henri Turot

Henri Turot (24 Feb. 1865, Bar-sur-Aube, France — 3 June 1920, Paris 16) was a French journalist and photographer who traveled across Southeast Asia — including Phnom Penh and Angkor - and South China in 1899, and co-founded in 1904 a small news agency, L’Agence Radio, taken over by Havas Agency in the 1920s. 

Leaning to socialism and the French Keft — he expressed his views in favor of Captain Alfred Dreyfus at an early stage -, Turot contributed to several provincial and Parisian print media before joining reporter Gaston Stiegler, working with Le Matin, into the challenge of beating Phileas Fogg’s fictional feat of traveling Around the World in Eighty Days (title of Jules Verne’s famous novel published in 1872). Traveling the other way, Stiegler scored a better result than his (63 days and 16 hours), but it gave Turot the opportunity to discover French Indochina, cover the Philippines War, and travel across South America (the latter experience resulting in the book En Amérique Latine, Paris, Vuibert et Nony, 1908). 

During his circling of the world, ​“famous French journalist” hit California, and was depicted ​“focusing his new French camera on San Francisco [source: San Francisco Examiner, 6 June 1901].

Turot published texts and photos in travel magazines of the time, in particular Le Tour du Monde and Le Monde illustré, while getting involved in international politics at the suggestion of French politicians Paul Doumer and Aristide Briand. During First World War, he was assigned to a confidential mission to Athens in 1915, as France was attempting to assert its diplomatic influence over Greece. 

A rare view of Phnom Penh from Wat Phnom in 1899. [photo by Henri Turot in Le Monde illustré, 22 April 1899, p 314.]