Fernand Nadal Gets Out Of Saigon

I’ve had my copy of Nihon No Minka for 30 years, and I only just found these three photos between the book and the dust jacket. They’re stamped Photo NADAL Saigon, the mark of Fernand Nadal, who operated a photo studio in Saigon for several decades in the early 20th century, when France still called the southern region of Vietnam Cochinchine. Nadal did lots of work for colonial companies and surveyors, and most of the images I see online are from his souvenir postcard sets. They’re almost all cities, though, buildings and public spaces mostly devoid of people. These are actual silver gelatin prints, 18 x 24 cm (actually around 17 x 23 by my quick check), with portraits of indigenous people in a rural village setting. The one photo of a man has a larger group of people in colonial dress in the background, but otherwise, everyone is South Vietnamese or Cambodian. Maybe the group of women are photographed under the same house the guy is standing in front of, I haven’t Errol Morris’d them…