Vue de la Ville Chinoise (Cholen) Feuille No. 2, Saïgon, Cochinchine 1866

Emile Gsell made this albumen silver print, titled "Vue de la Ville Chinoise (Cholen) Feuille No. 2, Saïgon, Cochinchine," while working in Vietnam, then known as Cochinchina, sometime in the late 19th century. Gsell’s photographs of Vietnam, taken during French colonial rule, offer a window into the complex relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. These images were often used to promote the idea of French superiority and the exoticism of the East, yet they also captured the everyday lives and landscapes of the Vietnamese people, sometimes even betraying the violence that characterized colonialism. Here, the scene of boats along the riverbank contrasts with the sense of the unknown or the foreign. This photograph asks us to consider how the act of seeing and documenting can both reveal and conceal the intricate social and political realities of a place.