Searching for a portrait of Émile Gsell

Émile Gsell (1838-1879) was a French photographer born in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines (Haut-Rhin). He took part in several exploration missions in Southeast Asia, including the Mekong Exploration Mission led by Captain Ernest Doudart de Lagrée and Francis Garnier, during which he photographed the Angkor Vat temple in June 1866. He would return to Angkor on several occasions...

It is written on the Internet and in books about the French photographer Émile Gsell that no images of him exist. On several occasions, I have searched the Web for a photograph that might correspond to a possible self-portrait or an anachronistic image of a Westerner among the populations photographed by Gsell.

On May 26, 2019, armed with the description of the Russian medium Katia Kolobaeva, a photograph of Émile's presumed grandson Jean-Louis and my meeting with Frédéric Gsell, I tried once again to find an image of the photographer on the Net, after many unsuccessful requests. Within seconds, I discovered a photo I'd never known existed. It's of a group of Western archaeologists at Angkor Wat. It could be the 1873 Khmer monument exploration mission led by Louis Delaporte. In the front row on the left, a figure wearing a dark shirt, while all the others are in white.  I immediately have the intuition that it could be Émile. Two elements immediately support this theory: he's in the front row, legs bent, feet on the step just below him, ready to pounce to his darkroom in place since he has nothing in front of him.Here, Émile has already made the sharpness adjustments and inserted his sensitive plate.He has asked one of his assistants to remove the lens cover for the exposure.He's already ready to pick up his glass plate and develop it as soon as possible.Wet collodion doesn't wait, especially in these latitudes! What's more, it seems that Émile himself has validated my hypothesis through a synchronicity. Indeed, at the very moment I had this intuition, my PhD friend Marylou C., whom I keep regularly informed of the progress of my research, including my relationship with Émile, sent me this message by WhatsApp at 1.20pm: "Did you get confirmation of your connection with Emile?".

To find out how I carried out the formal validations and more about my adventure with Émile Gsell, click here.