The photographic holdings of the Southeast Asia Collection are held in the Department of Manuscripts and Archives. Two major collections contain early black-and-white photographs: the Dan Beach Bradley Collection has images of rural Siam (now Thailand) and the Maurice Durand Collection has images of urban French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia).

Dan Beach Bradley (1804–1873) was the son of American missionaries and the compiler of the Siamese–Thai-to-English dictionary.

Maurice Durand worked at the Ècole Française d’Extrême-Orient office in Hanoi at the end of the French period and personally collected materials on early Vietnamese writings in Chinese characters. The photographs in Durand’s collection include a few hundred black-and-white annotated ethnographic photographs taken in Hong Kong and the New Territories in the mid-1950s.