Have your ID ready: citizenship,identification practices,and mobility in colonial Vietnam

Abstract

This article examines the adoption of photography in the surveillance efforts of the French colonial state in Vietnam before World War I. Through the colonial state’s historical documents, prison records, and photographs, the author investigates the role played by photography in relation to new ideas of citizenship and racialization, and argues that photography is a medium of colonialism and modernity, insofar as it is not strictly a Western technology but a consequence of cultural contact and negotiations. Specifically, the article examines the institutional practice of photography in three areas: prisons, immigration, and municipal tax system through three case studies of Poulo Condor, Haiphong, and Hanoi. Together, they build an overarching narrative of how photo identification, despite its limitations, became a standard practice in colonial Vietnam and preceded its widespread application in France in the 1940s. In doing so, this article highlights how colonies were historically treated as laboratories for new scientific endeavors. The author does this in order to argue against a linear narrative of progress that treats Europe as an incubator of innovations in the 20th century.

Chaotic, indecorous, rowdy. This is what the mornings of May 2022 look like at the multiple police stations in Hanoi. After passing several modifications to the new regulations of the identity cards, the Ministry of Public Security mandated that all Vietnamese citizens upgrade their identity documents to chip-based identity cards, as part of Project 06—a set of initiatives to modernize civil registration, digital ID, and banking authentication. Similar to the requirements which were already in place, everyone had to submit a physical copy of their new portrait photograph as part of the application. Within days, millions of people rushed to the police stations, bearing two copies of their photographs, to have their identification documents upgraded. While some were irritated by the new regulation, many were excited about the more modern look of their identity cards. However, the excitement about the new format of identity cards soon turned into anxiety since, just two years later, the state proposed another upgrade, now with additional biometrics such as iris scanning and voice recording, The proposed upgrade faced fierce resistance from several lawmakers and human rights lawyers who voiced concerns over privacy and data security. Nonetheless, proponents of these initiatives argued that the new sophisticated ID card would make public services such as healthcare and social security more efficient and accessible.

What strikes me about these upgrades and their debates is how photography has already been normalized as part of individual identification. As noted by James Scott (1998) in his book about modern statehood, the identification document is a powerful instrument to make legible a population which otherwise would have gone ungoverned by the state. For the colonial authorities, identification played an important role in reshaping the colonial order by surveilling, or even eliminating, the undesired population. As an example, in the case of British India, British officials in north India viewed hijras, who were born as male but adopted feminine clothing and female names, as a social problem. Thus, beginning in 1871, police began registering hijras in official records as part of an explicit effort to monitor and eliminate this population (Hinchy, 2019). The British recordkeeping method was, however, rather conventional, as information about hijras was limited to name, age, place of residence, districts frequently visited and date of emasculation, without any concrete visual clues to identify the individuals. By contrast, French colonists made more thorough use of biometric data in their surveillance of individuals whom they deemed unfit, including photographic reproduction of the face and fingerprints. As noted by historians, the French experimentation with surveillance technologies in this period was the catalyst in the formation of modern surveillance systems (Hughes, 2025; Hutchings, 2001). These parallels are not merely technical. Beyond the imperialist vision of a universal identification system is a series of cultural negotiations, wherein compromises on the technical as well as the cultural are made.

In this article, I examine the history of the institutionalization of photography in Vietnam in the years following the French annexation of Tonkin in 1886, which started what historians often consider the beginning of the French colonial period in Vietnam. Drawing from archival materials from the National Archives Centers in Vietnam, I demonstrate that a lesser-known debate about the use of facial images and fingerprints already happened in Vietnam during this period. I argue that the institutionalization of photography as a novel technology in colonial Vietnam encapsulates the Third Republic’s utopian visions of colonies as ‘laboratories of modernity’. In particular, I demonstrate how, despite the fact that the photographic reproduction of the face was found to be unreliable for identification, the reputation of a photograph as a modern means of truth was consequential to the colonial state’s experimentation with surveillance technologies. I also show how photography and its institutional practices in the period complicate the rigid dichotomies between coloniality and modernity, insofar as these two concepts have been mobilized by postcolonial scholars to refer to the imperialist production of knowledge, rather than modernity and coloniality as a set of cultural experiences.

As recognized by art historians, media scholars, and anthropologists, the historiography of photography is marked by two lines of inquiry. The first, following the traditions of curators Beaumont Newhall and Alison Gernsheim, treats photography exclusively as an art. Such tradition has proved to be atomizing since it is about the histories of individual photographs rather than photography as a medium. In the second, scholars have begun to question the cultural phenomena of photography. Acknowledging how photography was employed as a technology to materialize European imperialist vision of the Middle East, Ali Behdad (2016) reminds us that ‘photography, which in its materiality is a product of actual contact between light, chemicals, and paper, was a phenomenon whose historical development also was catalyzed by cultural contact.’ In their edited volume on the position of photography in media studies, Nicoletta Leonardi and Simone Natale (2018) also caution against an autonomous history of photography without considering the medium’s insertion into media systems and cultures of the period. Thy Phu’s recent book Warring Visions (2022) explores such an avenue by making a case for unique communist photographic aesthetics by examining the practices of Vietnamese photographers who confronted material and technical obstacles during the Vietnam War.

Within this second line of inquiry, scholars within Visual Studies are returning to the works of scholars such as Victor Burgin and John Tagg, who acknowledge the threat of photography as state surveillance. Tagg’s writings serve as my theoretical guideline throughout this study. Throughout Tagg’s various essays collected in The Burden of Representation (2021), he treats photography as a means of surveillance, an official record, and a legal document, uses which had been left on the sidelines by aestheticians. Underneath Tagg’s thinking is an interest in how disciplinary power, following Michel Foucault’s theorization, is inscribed in a wide range of practices of photography. For this reason, Tagg’s theoretical frameworks are apt for an analysis of how photography became an instrument for the French settlers to hold on to power during the French colonial period in Vietnam. Shortly after acquiring Tonkin in the northern part of Vietnam, France declared a new law in 1896 requiring all Asian immigrants and natives hired by French settlers to obtain an identity card containing a photograph as well as information about their employers. I will go into detail about how such programs were laid out on the ground later, but it is not too early to point out that historians have noted how the history of the formation of the identification document is parallel to the history of the formation of the state, in which it is the simplest manifestation of statehood (Noiriel, 2001). As Vietnam began its transition from imperial rule to French Republicanism, the colonial government’s establishment of a nationwide individual identification program was crucial in legitimizing the state’s power in the colony. Before French colonial rule, Vietnamese individuals were registered within their villages, which kept thorough records of family genealogies, as well as population registers called đinh bạ. This system, however, was not well followed during the mid-19th century, when conflicts between France and Vietnam escalated (Lê and Ueda, 2024). In some ways, the new process of civil registration was similar to that under imperial rule, but the requirement of a photograph was strictly understood by the locals as an exercise of power by the new French rulers.

In Fall 2024, I spent three months conducting archival research at the National Archives Centers in Vietnam (Hanoi and Đà Lạt). I surveyed documents from different branches of the French colonial government, from government contracts to letters between officials, and even databases from prisons. Together, these documents sketch out the historical landscape of how the identification document came into being and the role that photography played in shaping modern identification practices. In what follows, I trace the practices of photography through three different institutions established by the French rule: incarceration, immigration, and taxation. Readers will travel through three different sites where the French utopian vision of photography faced harsh realities on the ground.

At sea: The prisoners in Poulo Condor

Located about 180 kilometers off the southern Vietnamese coast, the Poulo Condor is an archipelago known for its sandy beaches and softly crashing waves. Today, it is a popular vacation spot for wealthy families because of the swanky hotels and resorts. However, most guests of the island soon learn that it was home to one of the most brutal prisons in the world, Con Lon. In Thi Tù Tùng Thoại, a journal of the Vietnamese revolutionary Huỳnh Thúc Kháng, he recalled his 13-year imprisonment at Con Lon where over 20,000 Vietnamese inmates died during its operation from late 19th century to Điện Biên Phủ. Huỳnh documented every step: from being arrested without a warrant to working as a clerk in prison in Poulo Condor. His memoir provides a record of the carceral systems imposed on the colonial subjects by French rule. As described by Huỳnh, every prisoner had to shave their heads before having their photographs taken at the station. Once they arrived at the prison, they were forced to wear a wooden placard with a number engraved, along with other information about their crimes and the date of release, if any. They performed labor in harsh conditions. To all of the guards and wardens, Huynh and other prisoners were known by their numbers and not their names.

France’s establishment of the penal colony in Southeast Asia belonged to a new effort of reforming the penitentiary system in Europe, which Foucault famously identified as a transition from punishment to discipline. In an attempt to separate the convicts from the society, France established several penal colonies across the world called bagne. On 1 February 1862, Admiral Louise-Adolphe Bonard ordered the establishment of a penal colony on one of the islands in the archipelago following the conquest of the southern part of Vietnam (Cochinchina). This island then became known as Con Lon. The first few decades of the prison’s operation were marked by plagues and frequent uprisings, rendering the colony almost uninhabitable. While the prison was originally built to hold only 200 inmates, the number of convicts sent to Con Lon exceeded more than its capacity. Thus, a new decree was issued for the expansion of the prison in 1903 by the French government.

While the brutal conditions of the prisons are well documented by historians, they have also noted that the absence of academic studies about bagne represents a striking example of postcolonial amnesia. In fact, in Discipline & Punish (1995), Foucault rarely discussed the bagne, let alone how the managerial practices there clearly displayed a new effort of racial segregation. A potential explanation for such an omission is the lack of access to the colonies themselves, exacerbated by harsh conditions which led to the mismanagement of archival materials. At the Archives nationales d’outre-mer, there are only three extant files on prisoners at Poulo Condor and only two preserved sets of photographs.

In order to understand how penal colonies operated within the French Empire, I look at how these colonies became integrated into a larger disciplinary system after France completed its annexation of the region. As detailed by Peter Zinoman (2001) in his comprehensive study of the social lives inside prisons in French Indochina, the prison system in the region never followed the emergence of the modern penitentiary in Europe and the US. Instead of focusing on modifying inmate behavior, it was dependent on coercion. After annexing Tonkin in 1886, France formalized its penal system in the colony with three types of prisons: central prisons in urban centers such as Saigon and Hanoi, local prisons in smaller towns, and penitentiaries in remote areas like Poulo Condor, which held the most dangerous type of prisoners who served lengthy sentences of forced labor, such as recidivists and political crimes. Many of the prisoners of Poulo Condor, in fact, were held at central and local prisons for a while before being transported to penitentiaries.

The case of Poulo Condor presents a shift in the managerial style of the French Republic. The large number of prisoners plus the complexity of transportation between colonies demanded innovative ways of tracking prisoners. Photography thus became a means of surveillance for the settlers, starting as early as the late 1870s when France was still mobilizing troops in the Indochinese peninsula. However, what the French colonists hoped to achieve through photography was an utter failure. In a 1900 letter to the Resident Superior of Tonkin, Resident of Haiphong Léon Jean Laurent Chavassieux proposed a plan to take photographs of the 160 Vietnamese prisoners in Haiphong, who would be released soon. However, the Resident Superior of Tonkin rejected the plan, citing the failed attempt in 1872 to photograph the Vietnamese prisoners because the dissimilarities between Asians are too ‘insignificant’; this has come to be known as ‘the cross-race effect’, whereby people of one race have difficulty differentiating or identifying individuals of a different race. He then suggested that anthropometric systems such as ‘menace phalanges’ (fingerprints) are much more effective. ¹

Despite its mechanical achievements, photography still could not help the French colonial administrators to overcome the biases of the cross-race effect. At the same time, the police in metropolitan Paris also faced challenges with recidivists. As the police began attaching photos of criminals to their files, a problem arose. Police did not know how to deal with repeated offenders, and their biggest issue was overcoming the possibility that an arrestee could lie about their prior arrests if they were arrested by a different officer. In the 1880s, policing in Europe took a turn by the invention of bertillonage, a method to identify repeated offenders by body measurements and photographs designed by Alphonso Bertillon. In his role at the Paris Prefecture of Police, Bertillon was swimming in the sea of photographs of registered individuals. Without any reliable technology to connect the photograph to the existing database, Bertillon developed a system of records based on measurements of the body. Following Bertillon’s methods, officers produced anthropometric measurements of a standard group of 11 body parts for all arrested individuals and organized the archives around the numerical measurements. Technicians would then produce a set of measurements from their body and look into the archive of previously convicted individuals for a corresponding set. The photograph was simply the last means to confirm one’s identity.

Commenting on the bertillonage, Allan Sekula (1986) contends that the ‘central artifact of this system is not the camera but the filing cabinet’. Unlike the common perception of a photograph as the bearer of objective reality, the early adoption of photography in policing demonstrates how photography’s widespread application was shaped by institutional practices. Tagg (2021), for example, argues that photographic truth is the product of a specific discursive order, rather than the mechanical properties of the photographs themselves. In particular, he notes how traces of power can be identified through disciplinary photography, ‘the body isolated; the narrow space; the subjugation to an unreturnable gaze; the scrutiny of gestures; faces and features; the clarity of illumination and sharpness of focus; the names and number boards’.

In colonial Vietnam, the Judicial Identification Service was created in 1897 in Saigon, Cochinchina. Tasked with photographing and taking biometric data from all arrested individuals, this unit however did not start implementing the project until 1909 when its sibling service was established in Hanoi. Yet, as suggested through the exchanges between state officials, the identification service faced resistance from the local levels where disputes over budgets stalled the implementation of the service. ² Nonetheless, the documents from the agency during the period suggest that it was able to create a somewhat comprehensive system of identifying and managing convicts. For example, in an exchange between two officials about the transfer of the 20 prisoners in Hanoi, the warden of a local prison submitted a database. Figures 1 and 2 illustrate a snippet of it, along with an example of the bertillonage card of a convict.

Figure 1.

A page from a copy of the list of 20 prisoners photographed at the Hoan Long prison. ‘Liste de 20 prisonniers photographiés détenus à la prison de Hoan Long (Hanoi) dont trois partisans de Hoang Hoa Tham.’ TTLTQGI. G8.F68/No.71931.

Figure 2.

A bertillonage card of a prisoner from the list. TTLTQGI. G8.F68/No.71931.

The database here shows a familial history of prisoners, with information about their names, birthplace, parents, the nature of the crime, along with their unique numbers and mug shots organized in a tabular format. The prisoners were also classified by other categories such as age and gender. By referring to the number on a prisoner’s placard, the biological classifications, and the mug shot from the database, the warden could then identify a single individual from a group of prisoners. Thus, this document represents the power that the state had over its colonial subjects; it was a powerful organization of information that was only available to the wardens and colonial officers. On the other hand, the prisoner’s placard (which can be seen in the top left corner of their photos) is an early model of the modern identity document. While these early practices of identification were applied mostly to convicts, French settlers soon recognized how they could also restrict movements of individuals throughout the French Empire. Driven purely by economic motivation, the French colonial expansion into the Indochinese peninsula aimed to facilitate trade with other markets in the region. Since Vietnam occupied a strategic geographical location as a crossroad between multiple countries, it was frequented by large groups of foreign merchants, mostly Chinese immigrants who established their own communities in parts of Vietnam. While they are not Vietnamese and occupy a higher-class status in the social hierarchy because of their economic positions, the Chinese faced frequent harassment from the French settlers, including the use of Bertillonage-style anthropometrics imposed on them. In the following section, I will go into detail about how the Chinese played a role in pushing back the agendas of the Judicial Identification Service in Cochinchina, which delayed its implementation in the north until 1909.

By the coast: The Chinese in Hai Phong and Saigon

Within the colonial context in Vietnam, the term ‘Chinese’ connotes an ethnicity rather than a citizenship. The history of Chinese migrants went back as far as 1644, when the first massive wave of Ming loyalists escaped the mainland to avoid the persecution of the Manchu-ruled Qing dynasty. They settled down in coastal areas of modern-day Vietnam like Saigon and Hội An. In the south, the Chinese population grew quickly and under the aggressive assimilationist policies of emperor Minh Mạng (1820–1841), Chinese officially became one of the many recognized ethnicities in Vietnam. As an ethnic population with its own unique cultural and religious attributes, the Chinese must belong to one of a set of officially approved congregations based on their place of origin in China (Barrett, 2012). After France annexed the north, another wave of Chinese migrants moved to Haiphong, a coastal city which is only 50 miles east of Hanoi. For many centuries, Haiphong facilitated major transactions that reinforced the China–Vietnam diplomatic relationship. However, under the threat of France throughout the 19th century, Haiphong was closed until 1874. The establishment of Tonkin as a French protectorate then turned Haiphong into a strategic port city and increasingly attracted Chinese congregations. Knowing exactly how powerful the Chinese were, the French colonial administrators reluctantly recognized the congregations and their leaders after annexation.

The large waves of Chinese migration to colonial Vietnam in the second half of the 19th century have been well documented by historians. The intercultural contacts have produced a profound impact on the Sino-French politics and shaped new changes in immigration policies. In the south, Saigon-Cholon is a major Chinese enclave and the robust economic activities generated by Chinese congregations during the colonial period have been well documented by historians (Le, 2023). In the early 1890s, the French settlers faced severe obstacles in maintaining order throughout the region. Pirates and smugglers often harass business owners. Within their own congregations, the Chinese also recognized how Chinese pirates and gangs would hurt their own businesses, so congregation leaders were the first to support the expulsion of those who were involved with pirate groups. In 1894, the congregation leaders in Saigon requested an authorization to tattoo all expelled individuals since they knew convicts were able to evade surveillance with ease. However, the French government considered such a method ‘contrary to our principles of civilization’ and tabled the item so they could solicit new ideas from the metropole (Anderson, 2015). In 1897, the proposal by the French forensic Pottecher, a student of Bertillon himself, for the establishment of the anthropometric service was approved with limited funding. The approval only came after the recommendation to attach the service to the Immigration Department to monitor the Chinese, rather than the Justice Department.

The border protocols in colonial Vietnam manifest the French desire to modernize immigration control through a thorough documentation of the alien body. Chinese merchants and workers frequently immigrated to Vietnam by boat. As soon as they arrived at the port, the Chinese were first examined on board by a health service worker. After depositing their personal belongings, the migrants embarked under escort in new boats and were then transported to a landing stage where the offices of the immigration and identification service were located. Subjected to a second brief medical examination, they were vaccinated. Men over 15 years were then documented through fingerprinting both hands and taking body measurements, such as the height and bust. Imprints were also taken of the internal folds in the phalanges of their left index fingers. Finally, a precise inventory of facial features and distinguishing marks completed the individual processing. Women and children over 7 years old underwent less detailed identity documentation (About, 2012).

As soon as the protocols were implemented, a powerful protest emerged in Saigon. Congregation leaders found the indiscriminate use of bertillonage too invasive and degrading because it was originally designed for criminals. The humiliation experienced by individuals during the registration procedures, the harassment that accompanied them, and the physical and symbolic ordeal that they represent demonstrate the perception of these measures by the individuals themselves and, at the same time, the meaning attributed to them by the authorities. They also pointed out the inequities in the hike of head tax, which paid for the photographs. By 1898, modifications to the 1897 proposal were made, with the collections of only fingerprints and two body measurements (height and chest circumference) along with special markings such as birthmarks and tattoos.

Within a few years, the modifications allowed the service to produce over 120,000 cards. Chinese leaders continued to file complaints about the treatment, especially the brutality committed by the French officers including Pottecher himself. In 1904, Pottecher was removed from his post under heavy pressure by the congregation leaders. By re-establishing relationships with the officials of the Qing dynasty, Chinese congregations were able to force the French ambassador in Peking to address the potential Chinese boycott against French imports in the region. In a surprising move to appease the Chinese, the General Governor of French Indochina at the time, Jean Baptiste Paul Beau, instructed the service to only measure criminals (Anderson, 2015).

Unlike what happened in the south, French settlers in the north faced a different reality in which both foreign and local photographers competed with their French counterparts in their own field. When the 1897 decree was issued, the anthropometric identification service was only created in Saigon and not elsewhere, yet the requirement for a residence permit for foreign Asians was applied to the entire peninsula. Therefore, the administrators in the north struggled with the fact that they had no budget to comply with the decree. French administrators in the north thus relied on private contractors to carry out the tasks. Beginning in late 1897, the City of Haiphong hired photographers through a marché de gré à gré. While there is no equivalence of the term in English, it could be understood as a ‘bidding war’. A marché de gré à gré is a call of submissions from private businesses for the colonial government’s contracts.

While photography studios existed in both France and parts of the colonies in the 19th century, they catered to wealthy families and royals. As argued by Elizabeth Anne McCauley, the studio boom in the 19th century was an inevitable outcome of the carte de visite (McCauley, 1985). Proposals to use small photographs for legal identification were made throughout the 1850s, but the costs associated with such proposals were too high. Seeing the potential need for such use, André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri patented the carte de visite in 1854 and turned his business into a prominent studio in the 1860s. Copyright legislation that covered the work of photographers was passed, marking a moment when photographers entered an economy of reproductions already established by printmakers and painters.

Similarly to how photography studios struggled in a changing market in mainland France, studios in Tonkin went through hard times during the last decades of the 19th century. Letters and contracts from the period show that European photographers and colonial administrators struggled with a new market in racially diverse Haiphong. In Haiphong, Pierre Dielefils was the first photographer who was contracted by the city. He was tasked with taking photographs of foreign Asians living in the city in 1895. However, in 1896, the city awarded the contract to Max Martin, an Austrian photographer who owned several studios in Singapore, Saigon, and Haiphong. Martin’s winning bid was contested by Dielefils, who wrote to the mayor expressing his dissatisfaction with how ‘only foreigners have been favored’ and that major cities in the colony ‘have been in their hands for three years’. Dielefils ended the letter by requesting the city to favor French photographers, giving an example of how another French settler had to close his photography studio in Indochina after only two years.

During the second half of the 19th century, photography studios were owned by Europeans except Cam Hieu Duong in Hanoi, which was owned by Đặng Huy Trứ, a court official. Most prominent European photographers like Hippolyte Arnoux and Émile Gsell chose Saigon as their homebase. Their collaboration in 1880 produced Voyage de l’Égypte à l’Indochine, which was the first photobook to introduce life in the colony through a collection of photographs. The establishment of European studios during this period paralleled a photographic boom in Latin America, following the end of Daguerre’s ‘magic box’. Europe and the US saw an explosion of new styles and motifs as photographers packed up their equipment and ventured beyond their studios. Photography thrived in Latin America, just as in French Indochina, because it was a new field and permitted both professionals and amateurs to compete as equals (Levine, 1989).

The pioneering work of European photographers in Cochinchina produced a new generation of young French men, who were bought into the rhetoric of the civilizing mission and enlisted in the army. Pierre Dielefils joined the army in 1883 and insisted on going to French Indochina, where he picked up an interest in photography. He produced his first photograph in 1887 and continued training himself until he opened his own business in Hanoi, the first to do so in Tonkin. Unlike Gillet and Gsell, who were trained professionally, Dielefils did not position himself as a photographer or an artist, but as a technician and a retail dealer, offering a wide choice of items at his business such as negative plates, photographic paper, cameras, and other materials for amateur photographers like himself (Vincent, 1997). In fact, his business was profitable from selling postcards.

Looking closer at the contracts in Haiphong, one can also observe how administrators and European photographers were also confused with new ideas of citizenship. The collection of letters between the mayor and the Resident Superior discussing the contract with M Martin, the Austrian photographer, displays the bureaucratic redundancy and confusion over racial differences and nationalities. In 1900, the city announced another call for photographers with more specifications: the contractor must live in Haiphong, have a reliable business, and would be responsible for taking photographs of the ‘Asians’ in Haiphong. Without any knowledge of another call which was made by the Resident Superior of Tonkin, the city approved the contract with Max Martin, who lived in Haiphong. The approval upset the Head of the 3rd Bureau, which was the agency responsible for the operation of the French military in the region, because they already made a separate call earlier. The Head of the 3rd Bureau argued that the contract must be voided, and the decision must be made by the Resident Superior, not the city. In a rebuttal, the Mayor of Haiphong, Eugène Domergue, defended the city’s decision and pointed out several inconsistencies with racial references in the call of photographers.

The first thing the mayor pointed out is that the word ‘Asians’ bore no distinct meaning since the concept of race had not been yet articulated in French law. In fact, most historians have pointed out how the French official categories of Vietnamese ‘indigenous’ versus Chinese migrants as ‘foreign Asians’ expose an anxiety over racial solidarity (Goscha, 2012). In order to uphold the ‘civilizing mission’, French settlers prioritized making Vietnamese natives ‘French’ while shielding them from the Chinese influence. Thus, the word ‘Asians’ in the contract demonstrated the racist tendency to categorize all Asian populations under an umbrella term. Knowing exactly how that would create a new form of kinship among the Vietnamese and the Chinese, the Governor insisted on officials using the formal categories of ‘natives’ and ‘foreign Asians’. The intention behind the establishments of these categories was to divide the diverse population in Haiphong and discourage the formation of a common sense of Vietnamese nationality by encouraging assimilation into a unique French identity. In colonial Vietnam, the state employed a segregated racial hierarchy within the police forces, with a European cadre overseeing a subordinated and much larger indigene (native) workforce. It was not until the end of the 20th century that historians began to take racial differences as a serious subject to study, given how Europeans were a racial minority in the colonial society (Chapman and Frader, 2004). For instance, Michael Vann (2003) pointed out that the construction of ‘whiteness’ as a normalized identity was intrinsic to the exercise of colonial privilege.

Acknowledging that they were a racial minority in a colony, the French aimed to assert their colonial power through technologies. However, as media anthropologist Brian Larkin (2008) remarks, ‘technologies are unstable things.’ The meanings of technologies are vulnerable to changing social and political orders, especially in the colonial contexts. In fact, the practice of photographing Chinese immigrants, which caused a social uprising in the late 1890s, paved the way for such a practice to be accepted by the Vietnamese in the early 1900s.

Inside the metropolis: The workers in Hanoi

If Haiphong was the gateway for the flow of goods during the colonial period, Hanoi was where the consumer culture began. Within the first decades following the absorption of the region into the French Indochinese Union (made up of Laos, Cambodia, Cochinchina, Tonkin, and Annam), the French government made Hanoi its capital in 1902. Hanoi then became a political center where administrators and other high-ranking officers resided, including Eugène Domergue, who left Haiphong to become the new mayor of Hanoi. Beginning as a settlement, Hanoi then underwent a transformation which was modeled after the Haussmannization of Paris in the mid-19th century. Two major infrastructural projects that the French government initiated to improve its bureaucracy were the installation of electric lighting in the streets of Hanoi and the creation of a postal service connecting cities (Endres, 2024). Hanoi was redesigned to be a new commercial center, so the urban core (what tourists often called the Old Quarter today), was rebuilt with shophouses for French and Chinese businesses (Papin, 2013). Factories were also erected in the city, pushing the Vietnamese to the suburbs. As noted by French settlers, ‘Hanoi’s borders are not just municipal; they are national frontiers’ (Joyeux and Virgitti, 1937).

To promote the new establishment of Hanoi as the French capital in the far east, French colonists held the world’s fair in the city from November 1902 to December 1903, where over 4,000 exhibitors from the world participated, including Pottecher who exhibited his bertillonage system and demonstrated how no individual can evade such a surveillance. In Entrée Gratuite, a vivid description of the world’s fair in Hanoi by Alfred Raquez, the author describes the ways Pottecher amused the crowd by quickly classifying a set of fingerprints to pull out a corresponding bertillonage card with the photographs attached. Pottecher also gave an example of how he identified a Vietnamese who unsuccessfully evaded the system by changing his names and his appearance, but his fingerprints and birthmarks still remained the same (Raquez, 1903).

While there are few records of Vietnamese resistance to such an invasive surveillance system, it does not eliminate the possibility of routine evasion. At the same time, the acceptance of biometrics as a means of population control supports another line of inquiry, that of the collaborationist politics which displays a more multifaceted inter-Asian relations in the region. The French Indochina encompasses Laos, Cambodia, and the three regions that make up of modern Vietnam. As noted by Christopher Goscha (2009), the racial and ethnic hierarchy in French Indochina was fabricated and embraced by the French, who frequently considered the Cambodians and Lao as ‘childlike’, ‘sweet’, and ‘lazy’ while viewing the Vietnamese as ‘intelligent’ and ‘cunning’. On the other hand, the attempt to categorize the Chinese in the region as ‘foreigners’ also complemented France’s establishment of a unique nationality for each colony and protectorate, separate from the Chinese domination which still existed through the puppet imperial court in Hue. It is important to note that the failures of the Can Vuong movement in 1896, which aimed to expel the French and reinstall the monarchy, also unveiled many weaknesses that the Vietnamese needed to overcome in their organization to mobilize a national insurgency against the French. In fact, many Vietnamese revolutionaries acknowledged the pitfalls of the movement, and welcomed European interventions at the time, as they deemed the imperial court and the mandarins to be parasitic and corrupt. ³ To accept European interventions at the time, they argued, means avoiding unnecessary bloodshed and to use the principles of the Enlightenment to fight for their own freedom.

It is within this political dilemma that a new shift in accepting colonial rule was forged inside Hanoi as the new capital of French Indochina. Two major policies set Hanoi apart from other urban centers in the region. First, Tonkin was technically a protectorate and not a colony like Cochinchina; therefore, many Vietnamese could find jobs working alongside the ranks of French settlers within the administration, though the top positions were exclusively reserved for Frenchmen. Second, the urbanization of Hanoi also demanded a new tax, called the ‘municipal tax’, imposed on the natives living in the city. Starting in 1904, all residents in Hanoi were required to register with the police and pay this tax annually. The city reinforced the tax through a ‘municipal tax card’ on which taxpayer information appears alongside a photograph of the individual. While the tax cards were the vehicles for the French to enforce policing, they were also the medium for the Vietnamese to assimilate themselves into a new colonial regime, especially through the production of those very photographs.

Figure 3 provides an example of a tax card in Hanoi from 1904. The photograph was taken in the style of a mug shot. Instead of having the number placed next to his head, the sitter holds the placard showing his number. Other information in the card includes height, name, age, profession, address, and the issuance date written in French. Whereas the card gives an impression of a dehumanizing experience for the Vietnamese, and the French texts suggest a sense of Western superiority, a closer look at the production of the photograph and the language of the period indicates the role the Vietnamese played in the making of the tax card. By this time, Pottecher was already removed from his post and the lack of biometric information on the tax cards, except the photograph, suggests how the pushback against anthropometric measurements by the Chinese immigrants was fruitful. Furthermore, not only were the photographs taken by the Vietnamese themselves, but a vernacular French language was also made and eventually led to the formalization of quốc ngữ, a Romanized Vietnamese alphabet.

Figure 3.

A copy of a tax card from 1904. TTLTQGI/No.2.6882.

Unlike Haiphong, Vietnamese photographers in Hanoi were already active in the late 19th century. Many Vietnamese locals found jobs working as lab technicians for Chinese and European photographers. Beginning in the early 1900s, the new requirement of the photograph for the tax cards allowed the Vietnamese in Hanoi to compete with their masters. Without an anthropometric service in Hanoi and a limited budget, the Mayor of Hanoi Domergue applied what he did in Haiphong and initiated a call for bidders. The winner was the Vietnamese photographer Le-Dinh-Hung, who was able to propose taking photographs for 16 cents apiece, the lowest price pitched. In the following years, Vietnamese photographers continued to win these bidding wars and, by the 1910s, European photographers finally realized that they could not compete with Vietnamese photographers any longer because of the low prices they offered. In response to the 1911 call for contractors to photograph natives between 1912 and 1918, all the bidders were Vietnamese who had established their own studios in the city. The increasing number of Vietnamese-owned studios and their success in securing government contracts before and during World War I foreshadowed a prosperous period of cultural assimilation in the interwar years. By 1922, Vietnamese-owned studios already dominated the market. Advertisements for Vietnamese studios dominated newspapers with taglines such as ‘owned by Tonkinois’ and ‘low prices’. No longer restricted to the market of government-issued photo ID, Vietnamese studios also sought to supply a new demand for family albums, reproductions for newspapers, and equipment for the amateur market. The ability of the Vietnamese studios to maneuver between artistic production for the consumers and technical dimensions for evidentiary purposes indicates how Vietnamese photographers were able to grasp what John Tagg (2021) describes as an ideological contradiction inherent in the public functions of photography. On the one hand, photography operates in the domain of art whose privilege is ‘a function of its lack of power’. On the other hand, in the scientific-technical domain, the power of photography rests on its renunciation of privilege.

While photography began to wield its power on a more general public, anthropometric measurements continued to be taken of convicts after the establishment of the service in the north in 1909. However, the service yielded insignificant results, and the practices were inconsistent with the law. In a letter from the Resident Superior of Tonkin to the administrators of the city of Nam Dinh in 1912, he demanded a search for two Vietnamese men who escaped from the prison and attached the two photographs of them. This set of photos presents typical mug shots, with both side and frontal views. In the bottom left corner are the anthropometric measurements of the prisoners, followed by their names, written in Romanized alphabet, and index numbers. The Vietnamese sitters were shaved and dressed in ripped outfits, indicating that, by the time these photos were taken, they were already convicted. The timing of the taking of the photographs here betrays the original goal of remedying recidivism since the photos were supposed to be taken at the time of the arrest to represent how a convict would appear in everyday life. Inconsistencies in practices and the associated costs for the project eventually gave the Bertillon system an unreliable reputation. As France abandoned the Bertillon system in 1914 in favor of more accurate technologies such as fingerprinting, anthropometric agencies in the colonies also ceased to exist.

While the Vietnamese played a role in the production of the photographic images in this period, they also participated in the adoption of a Romanized alphabet of Vietnamese. As pointed out by Keith Weller Taylor (2013), unlike how modern historians understand the ‘civilizing mission’ as an implication of how precolonial society was considered ‘backward’, French administrators and missionaries acknowledged the Vietnamese as a civilized people with their own history, religions, and ways of organizing their families. When the French settlers attempted to pacify the region after annexation, they acknowledged that the locals had a separate system of civil registration called đinh bạ, thorough records of family genealogies organized at the village level. The locals also organized their territories as ‘huyện’ (districts) under the imperial administration. Given how the local organization was way too effective, the French settlers maintained such a system and the tax cards reflect such sentiment by showing how ‘huyện’, as the Romanized version of the Chinese word 縣, was incorporated as an official administrative unit.

The popularization of the Romanized alphabet was a compromise made between the French settlers and the locals. As the Vietnamese learned how to speak French, French settlers also found it easier to be accepted as settlers by learning and respecting Vietnamese cultures. In fact, when the first Catholic missionaries came to Vietnam in the 17th century, they found it easier to spread Christianity by respecting local languages and cultures instead of eradicating them (Tran, 2022). Thus, the mandate of quốc ngữ in 1910 faced little resistance from the locals. As Jack Sidnell (2023) argues, the Romanized alphabet is ‘a medium for rational, free-minded debate’ and ‘an infrastructure for modern public life and civil society’. Looking back at the mug shots, tax cards, and even the spreadsheets, the Roman texts and the photographs made up a visual medium which together render the Vietnamese and their names, along with their own histories and cultures, to be seen and interpreted by the French colonists.

Conclusion

One of the starting points of my research was to pose the question of what a history of photography in Vietnam would look like if we consider photography as one of many technologies rather than an art. How did Vietnamese photographers adopt photography against the backdrop of colonial violence? How did it become a part of Vietnamese cultural and spiritual life? What was it about photography that caused great interest from both the Europeans and the Vietnamese? Historians often valorized the mechanical properties of photography and the efforts to elevate it to an art, but my archival research into the topic, quite surprisingly, illustrates how the cultural meanings of photography were shaped by constant economic and political negotiations between the local populations and the colonial authority. Starting as a technology of recording and documentation for the French settlers to monitor criminals in the late 1880s, its practices on the ground paradoxically exposed the underlying consistencies of concepts such as race and citizenship. By the onset of World War I, photography had acquired a new cultural meaning as an emblem of modernity for the local populations.

As I demonstrated in the history of how photography was instrumental in the assimilationist project in colonial Vietnam, the institutional practices of photography were not exclusively grounded in the belief that photography represented reality. Rather, its adoption, and later acceptance among colonial populations, reflects new notions of scientific tendencies following the Industrial Revolution. As noted by historian Joshua Cole (2000), the application of statistical methods to the study of populations, popularized by sociologist Émile Durkheim during the Third Republic, often became the subject of intense controversy throughout the 19th century since it redefined populations into an object available for technical interventions. Historiography of photography did not miss this shift. In the 1980s, Tagg argues that the emergence of Bertillon’s systematization of criminal records in the 1880s was bound up with the restructuring of disciplinary institutions, such as the police, prisons, asylums, hospitals. Following in Tagg’s footsteps, Allan Sekula (1986) also argues how the historiography of photography rarely addressed photographs as ‘literal documents’. However, critics of Tagg and Sekula have argued how the duo’s emphasis on power preceding photography overlooked the possibility of photography being a cultural agent in shaping unique experiences (Batchen, 1999). By centering colonial authority as an actor in popularizing photography as a new medium in colonial Vietnam, I have found that photography had in fact become an emblem of modernity in colonial Vietnam, not because of the reality that it represents, but the practices surrounding it that characterize a unique colonial experience. From the dehumanizing experiences of the sitter to the possibility of upward mobility through cheap labor by the autochthonous photographers, what photography promised was not a pathway to better futures, but a possibility for an exchange of power, where compromises between the East and the West, the old and the new, shaped the technologies’ local meanings.