53 years ago this weekend, a photograph from the Vietnam War shocked the world: It captured a naked Vietnamese girl and other children running down the road after a napalm attack. The "Napalm Girl' photo, as it became known, led to a Pulitzer Prize for Associated Press staffer Nick Ut. In recent months, however, controversy about who shot that photo has rocked the photojournalism world.
The 1972 photo was officially titled "The Terror of War." It captures the moment when 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc fled naked, her arms outstretched, after South Vietnamese bomber planes mistakenly targeted her village Trảng Bàng.
"We heard the soldiers yelling to us, 'children, you have to run.' And I saw exactly four bombs," Kim Phuc has recounted many times, as she did in the 2021 documentary From Hell to Hollywood. "The fire burned off all my clothes," she recalls, as she screamed "too hot, too hot."
Kim Phuc remembers passing out after getting doused with water. But she has always thanked the man she calls "Uncle Nick" for taking her and the other children to a nearby hospital. Nick Ut was then a 21-year-old photojournalist working for the AP's Saigon bureau.
Since that day on June 8, 1972, Ut has repeated his recollections of that day. "I saw the girl with her arms, running, screaming," he told the AP. "When she passed me I saw her skin come off, the body burned so badly," he says in the 2021 documentary that chronicles his career.
The photo that Ut says he took of that moment ended up on the front pages of American newspapers, galvanizing the anti-war movement. Ut won the Pulitzer Prize and the World Press Photo of the Year for the image. He continued working for the AP in Southern California until his retirement in 2017.
Until now, his legacy was unchallenged. But a new documentary, The Stringer, calls Ut's photo credit into question.
"The photograph of Kim Phuc is perhaps the most iconic, famous photograph of a war ever made," photojournalist Gary Knight says in the film. "And the idea that it might have been made by somebody else other than Nick Ut was devastating, actually."
Knight, who runs the VII Foundation — an organization based in France that trains photojournalists — set out with his team to investigate an allegation made by Carl Robinson, who worked at the AP's Saigon bureau. Robinson claims the late photo editor Horst Faas ordered him to give photo credit to the wrong man.
"Horst Faas, who had been standing next to me, said, 'Nick Ut, make it Nick Ut. Make it staff," Robinson says in The Stringer. "Those were his words exactly. And those have been with me the rest of my life."
Knight says after hearing Robinson's story, he "very quickly started thinking about the person that Carl said had taken the photograph."
For the documentary, Knight and his team hired French forensics firm INDEX to analyze photos, videos and satellite images taken outside Trảng Bàng that infamous day. They also tracked down a Vietnamese man named Nguyễn Thành Nghệ, who was also there with a camera. In the film, Nguyễn's family makes the case that he was the one who took the photograph, and that credit should have gone to him.
"I took the photo," Nguyễn, who is now in his late 80s, said after thanking the audience at the premiere of The Stringer at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
"He got a standing ovation," says the film's director Bao Nguyen. (He has no relation to Nguyễn Thành Nghệ, who now lives in Southern California.) "No matter which perspective you have on that story, him being able to say that after 53 years was important."
Bao Nguyen says he grew up revering Nick Ut's work. He says challenging the photo's attribution does not take away from the impact of that image.
"Just looking into the eyes of Kim Phuc screaming and running and just sort of losing all her innocence in that moment is something that's honestly very hard for me to look at," he told NPR. "My parents were refugees from Vietnam. My dad was a soldier in the Southern Vietnamese army as well. And I often think about my mother and her being around that same age, so that photograph is deeply personal to me."
Last month, in response to the film, World Press Photo suspended its authorship attribution of the photo.
The Associated Press launched its own investigation, interviewing witnesses, examining film negatives and the known footage and still shots from that day. The AP did its own 3D analysis and researched the type of camera that shot the image.
In a report, the AP concluded there are still questions about who shot the image, but Nick Ut's photo credit remains.
Kim Phuc insists that Ut shot the photo and also saved her life by taking her to the hospital. They have kept in touch all these years. Other eyewitnesses back up Ut's account, including former The New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield, who wrote a declaration supporting the retired AP photographer.
And more than 400 photographers have signed an open letter supporting Ut. Acclaimed photojournalist David Burnett, who was also outside Trảng Bàng in 1972, photographing for The New York Times, co-wrote the letter that asks World Press Photo "to reconsider its decision and reinstate the authorship that it has maintained for over 50 years … until proven otherwise."
"I have this very distinct memory looking down the road and seeing the kids finally run through the field and on to the road," Burnett told NPR. "Nick was the only one who was down the road far enough to make that picture."
Burnett says he refused to be interviewed for The Stringer, and still has not seen it. He remains convinced that it was Ut who captured "the hellacious moment of this one little 9-year-old girl. It captured so much about what had happened to so many people during that war, and the civilian population in particular."
Just this week, Ut and his legal team watched The Stringer for the first time.
"This is not journalism. This is fantasy filmmaking," Ut's attorney Jim Hornstein told NPR. "Nick is disgusted by the film. It's an alternative universe created by Gary Knight and the VII Foundation."
Hornstein says The Stringer is filled with fabrications.
"They have chosen to rely on totally unreliable witnesses and an alleged forensic workup which is completely destroyed by the AP report and will be destroyed by our own expert," he said.
Hornstein insists that Nick Ut did take that famous photo, and says he's preparing to file a defamation action against the filmmakers of The Stringer.
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