A keen amateur photographer, Gaden was inseparable from his camera during the forty years of his career as a military officer and administrator in Africa. His photographs form a unique pictorial record of everyday life at French colonial and military outposts—and for local communities and peoples. With camera in hand, Gaden knew how to stand witness and capture life scenes of women and men—offering an ambiance, an exchange, even a degree of complicity between the administrator and his photographic subject, be it a prestigious defeated figure like Samory Touré or an ordinary encounter in a village, from Chad to the French Soudan, between 1894 and 1939.