Émile Gsell

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Angkor Wat ( albumen paper , 1866)
Ceremony in the Chinese Pagoda of Cholon

Émile Gsell (born December 31, 1838 in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines , Alsace , † October 16, 1879 in Saïgon , Cochinchina ) was a French photographer and explorer in Southeast Asia .

Gsell enlisted in the French military in 1858 and was posted to the Cochinchina colony. In 1866, towards the end of his military service, he was recruited by Ernest Doudart de Lagrée and Francis Garnier as a photographer for the first stage of their Mekong expedition . He accompanied the group from Saigon to the court of the Cambodian king Norodom and from there on to Angkor , which at that time was under Siamese rule. Numerous photographs were taken in Angkor at the end of 1866; After the Scotsman John Thomson , who had visited Angkor six months earlier, Gsell was the second person to photograph the temple ruins of Angkor. Gsell did not take part in the further, much more arduous journey through Laos and Yunnan ; instead, he returned to Saigon, where he settled as the first commercial photographer after his final discharge from the military.

In 1873 he returned to Angkor with Louis Delaporte , another former expedition member. At the World Exhibition in Vienna in 1873 he presented his photographs in two exhibitions (one on Angkor, one on the "Annamite" (Vietnamese) and Cambodian population) and was awarded a medal for this. In the spring of 1875 he accompanied the envoy Brossard de Corbigny to the imperial city of Huế , but was not allowed to take photographs there. At the end of the same year he came to Hanoi in Tonkin , which at that time was ruled by the black flags . About the turn of the year 1876/77 he worked again in Tonkin and traveled the Red River on a gunboat .

Gsell died of tropical fever in 1879 at the age of 40.

  • "Head of a Chinese Congregation"

  • "Mandarin"

  • "Dealer with an opium pipe"

  • "Pilgrim"

  • "Young Annamite"

literature

  • Jim Mizerski: Cambodia Captured: Angkor's First Photographers in 1860's Colonial Intrigues , Jasmine Image Machine, 2016, p. 3
  • Jérôme Ghesquière: Photographes en Indochine. Tonkin, Annan, Cochinchine, Cambodge et Laos au XIXe siècle , Marval, Paris 2001
  • John Hannavy: Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century photography , Volume 1: A – I, Taylor & Francis, 2008, pp. 624f, 1283f, 1318f

Web links

Commons : Emile Gsell  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Gsell, Émile
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French photographer and explorer in Southeast Asia
DATE OF BIRTH December 31, 1838
PLACE OF BIRTH Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines , Alsace
DATE OF DEATH October 16, 1879
Place of death Saïgon , Cochinchina