Émile Gsell

Émile Gsell (1838, 1879) was a pioneering French photographer who worked primarily in Cochinchina (present-day Vietnam) during the colonial period, becoming one of the first professional photographers to document Southeast Asia. He is best known for his ethnographic portraits, architectural studies, and landscape photographs of Indochina, which provided some of the earliest visual records of the region's people and monuments. His work holds significant historical and documentary value, offering a rare photographic window into 19th-century Vietnamese and Cambodian society and culture.