19th-century Indo-China

Strategically placed on the commercial routes between the Indian and Chinese worlds, the Indo-Chinese peninsula attracted Western attention long before the advent of photography. Colonization was an unavoidable outcome. At the end of the 19th century, Cochinchina, Tonkin, Annam (together now Vietnam), Cambodia, and Laos formed French Indo-China, and Burma had been claimed by Britain. Siam (Thailand) remained the only independent country in the region. Its experience of photography was also unusual.

In Siam, serious photographic activity not only started earlier than in Saigon or Hanoi, but the leading early photographer was a local man. This unique situation was thanks to King Rama IV (or Mongkut, reg. 1851-68), a scholar interested in foreign languages and sciences, including photography. Mongkut not only welcomed foreign photographers, as witness daguerreotype portraits of him by French missionaries, or John Thomson's photographs and writings, but employed as his photographer Khun Sunthornsathitsalak, a Thai Christian also known as Francis Chit who opened a commercial studio in Bangkok in 1863. Possibly as early as 1857, and presumably commissioned by Mongkut, Chit recorded images of kings, royal consorts and their children, courtiers, royal dancers, religious events, court ceremonial, and architecture. His work in fact defined Siam enduringly as a land of royal pageants. As Pipat has shown, his large panoramas of Bangkok form a unique record of the capital's architecture and its changes over time. Signed prints and other evidence now suggest that Chit actually was the author of images claimed and published by various Westerners, including Thomson in 1865 and Wilhelm Burger in 1869.

In Cambodia, a French protectorate from 1863, the court was photographed by visitors, in graceful postures similar to those of Chit in Bangkok. Photography in Cambodia, however, illustrates the more general pattern of colonial image making established in French Indo-China. It also included photographs of the Angkor ruins first described in detail by the French naturalist Henri Mouhot in 1863.

Although French missionaries had been present there for some time, the political takeover of Indo-China lasted from 1858 in Cochinchina (at the southern end of the peninsula) to the end of the century in Laos (in the centre). While the metropolitan government was lukewarm about annexation, local French pressure for it was strong, and one means to excite interest in Paris was photography. Records were created by the military, especially naval officers, and, over the whole period, by various exploratory missions. This typical colonial process of evaluating and taking possession explains the large number of photographs made for official purposes. Meanwhile, commercial photography was capturing more marketable subjects, although these also emphasized the French ‘civilizing’ presence in the form of official and civil architecture, military installations, and other evidence of Westernization. Also prominent were local customs, villages, peasants, and other subjects indicative of the country's wealth.

The stages of annexation influenced the evolution of photography; Saigon was the early photographic centre, Hanoi the later one. As Cochinchina's capital, Saigon was developed into a Western-type city. The first photographic studios in French Indo-China were established there, possibly by Clément Gillet (1864-67) and Charles Parant (1864). Famous visiting photographers include Thomson, en route from Singapore to Hong Kong in 1868. Émile Gsell, the leading early Saigon professional, alternated studio work with participation in official expeditions. In 1866 he went to Cambodia with a scientific mission to photograph Angkor. His carte de visite sampler gives a fair idea of his production, with the Angkor temples which made his reputation effectively subsidizing studio portraits. Many of these show Saigon people; others, individuals from Cambodia to Tonkin, including Chinese. There are actors and bullock carts, princes and priests, and Western architecture.

Absent from Gsell's portfolio was ethnography—that is, people photographed as specimens of a race or culture—a genre which eventually became important in the photography of Indo-China. This type of work, then in its infancy, met the perceived colonial need to classify populations in order to rule them. Prime examples in Indo-China were the hill tribes of Tonkin and Laos. French scientists and photographers also recorded the border tribes of the southern Chinese province of Yunnan, probably because the region was increasingly seen as a future extension of French Indo-China.

Thirty years after Gsell, at the northern end of Indo-China in Hanoi, Pierre-Marie Dieulefils created his own portfolio of portraits (including the now ubiquitous French officials), everyday scenes, and tribal types. In 1895 he was commissioned to travel over most of Tonkin and photograph foreign Asians for official registration purposes. He also became a successful postcard producer, and in 1909 published a classic record of the Angkor ruins.

Chit had captured a timeless fairy kingdom; Gsell, Cochinchina at an early stage of colonization; Dieulefils, Tonkin at a more advanced stage. All three photographers showed ‘Indochina’ and its people, yet in different places and at different times.

— Régine Thiriez

Bibliography

• Thomson, J., The Antiquities of Cambodia (1867).
• Des photographes en Indochine: Tonkin, Annam, Cochinchine, Cambodge, et Laos au XIXe siècle (2001).
• Pipat, Pongrapeeporn, Panorama of Bangkok in the Reign of King Rama IV (2001)