Old archives of images from 1960s Saigon are easy to come by, but how often does one get to have a peek into the past version of Đà Lạt.
Sans the ubiquity of camera phones today, photography was once an expensive hobby that few could afford. For most of the 1960s and 1970s, visual records of Saigon and Vietnam were created nearly exclusively by foreign travelers and American servicemen on their film cameras. This is one of the reasons why many albums of old Saigon photos are just limited to downtown Saigon, while those taken outside the city were often in the vicinity of US Army bases.
This set of film photos showcases a typical tourist’s trail in Vietnam in the 1960s: photos taken from the balcony at Caravelle, a detour to the Saigon Zoo, and local city streets chock-full of bicycles. Nothing much is known about the author, C. E. Hablutzel, apart from the fact that they were a prolific travel photographer who visited many countries across the world from 1960 to 1965.
Hablutzel’s Vietnam itinerary included Saigon, Lái Thiêu, Thủ Dầu Một and even a rare trip to Đà Lạt, offering some vistas of the sleepy resort town during a time before today's rampant concretization. If the Saigon shots are filled with people and urban rhythms, Đà Lạt photos are awash in different shades of green, from luxuriant hills to checkerboards of vegetable gardens being grown in the open air without the greenhouses of today.
Have a closer look below:
[Photos by C. E. Hablutzel via Flickr user manhhai]
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