In 1869 Vietnamese official of the Nguyễn dynasty, Đặng Huy Trứ, acquired and introduced the first camera to Vietnam during his trip to southern China. Upon his return he opened the very first photography studio in Hanoi. Subsequently, Vietnamese-owned photo studios opened businesses across the country and even in France. The famous Khánh Ký studio had a franchise in Paris and was possibly involved in the anti-colonial struggle in the 1910s, as it taught the trade to Nguyễn Ái Quốc later known as Ho Chi Minh. Grappling with her own family history, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn proposes to revisit a trove of photographic materials inherited from her great-grandfather, a mandarin of the third rank for the last emperor of Indochina. Salvaged and duly annotated by her grandfather once he moved to Canada in 1982, the images date from the mid-1910s to the 1970s and are the only remaining traces of the Nguyễn dynasty that the family possess, as these snapshots float on the backdrop of pivotal historical events.

Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn proposes a critical reflection on the frictions between vernacular artefacts and official documents while also addressing the role of photography in structuring identities and imagination as part of a process of decolonization. By tracing a history of local photographic practices by Vietnamese—rather than the commonly referred legacy by foreign-born photographers—Visual Empire is an investigation in the dissemination of cameras, the translation of the photographic gaze to the Far East and the making of the modern and decolonized subject in Vietnam.