‘We have to be able to ask difficult questions’: who really took the iconic Napalm Girl photo?

2 days ago 9

It is one of the most recognizable photographs of the 20th century: a naked girl – arms wide, face contorted, skin scorched and peeling – running toward the camera as she flees a napalm attack in South Vietnam. To her right, a boy’s face is frozen in a Greek tragedy mask of pain. To her left, two other Vietnamese children run away from the bombed village of Trảng Bàng. Behind them, an indistinguishable group of soldiers and, behind them, a wall of black smoke.

Within hours of publication in June 1972, the photo, officially titled The Terror of War but colloquially known as Napalm Girl, went the analog version of viral; seen and discussed by millions of people around the world, it’s widely credited with galvanizing public opinion against the US war in Vietnam. Susan Sontag later wrote that the horrifically indelible image of nine-year-old Kim Phúc in distress “probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a hundred hours of televised barbarities”. Sir Don McCullin, the legendary British photojournalist who covered the conflict, deemed it the single best photograph of what would later be called “The Television War”. Napalm Girl is, “simply put, one of the most important photographs of anything ever made, and certainly of the Vietnam war”, said Gary Knight, a British photojournalist with decades of combat photography experience.

For 53 years, Napalm Girl was credited to Huynh Cong “Nick” Út, a then-21-year-old South Vietnamese photojournalist working for the Associated Press in Saigon. But a controversial new documentary on Netflix argues that the iconic photograph long considered the pinnacle of war journalism – one which brought Út a Pulitzer prize, amid other international acclaim – was actually taken by a different man on the scene in Trảng Bàng that day.

According to The Stringer, directed by Bao Nguyen and narrated by Knight, the Terror of War was actually taken by a freelancer, or “stringer”, who sold his photos to the AP. The claim, and the film’s subsequent investigation, originates with a man named Carl Robinson, a former AP photo editor in Saigon who alleges that Horst Faas, the bureau’s legendarily domineering photo chief, ordered him to change the image’s credit from the stringer to Út, the only AP staff photographer on site that day.

Robinson, now in his 80s, emailed Knight out of the blue in 2022, seeking a journalist’s help in finding the unknown photographer – should he still be alive, he said, he wanted to offer an apology. Knight thought of the freelance photojournalists he met through his non-profit, the VII Foundation – “the stringers of today”, who, like Vietnamese freelancers during the war, are “often overlooked. Their work is often questioned. They work under much more difficult circumstances. They’re not insured. They don’t have pensions. They don’t have support. They often don’t have good equipment, and they are incredibly vulnerable photographing in their own communities.”

Knight wondered: “What must it feel like to be the man who took this photograph, if indeed Nick Út didn’t take it?” As a photographer, he imagined, it would be extraordinarily painful. As a student of photojournalism, particularly the vaunted war photography of Vietnam, it would be earth-shattering, perhaps reputation-threatening. The hallowed legacy of the photograph among Vietnamese-Americans is such that Nguyen, whose parents emigrated during the war, was hesitant to take on the project. “I didn’t want to disrupt this long-held narrative that Nick had taken the photograph,” he said. “And I didn’t want to disrupt the status quo of a community that always looked up to this achievement.”

But both Knight and Nguyen agreed: it was worth asking the question. “If journalists are going to hold everybody else in the world to account,” said Knight, “we have to be able to ask difficult questions of ourselves.”

The Stringer follows Knight, along with fellow journalists Fiona Turner, Terri Lichstein and Lê Vân, as they pursue their own investigation, from eyewitness interviews, to call-outs in present-day Ho Chi Minh City, to archival research from other footage taken that day (the film-makers say they were not given access to the AP’s archive). Their efforts eventually yield a name: Nguyễn Thành Nghệ, a driver for NBC that day who occasionally sold photographs to international news outlets as a freelancer. In the film, an emotional Nghệ, now also in his 80s and living in California, attests that he sold the photograph to the AP for $20 and a print, only to be haunted by the lack of credit for decades.

Nghệ appears, in the film, reserved and thoughtful, but his story proved incendiary within the world of photojournalism. Days before The Stringer’s premiere at the Sundance film festival in January – in which an emotional Nghệ appeared as a surprise guest, assuring through a translator that “I took the photo” – the AP published a lengthy report disputing the film’s account via its own internal analysis, describing Robinson as a “disgruntled” former employee, and standing by Út, who retired from a distinguished career with the organization in 2017. Several prominent photojournalists dismissed Nghệ’s claim outright, and campaigned against the film’s distribution; others expressed concern, given the current political environment, over any challenge to journalistic credibility. “We had people suggesting that we should drop the investigation because it was a bad time for journalism,” Knight recalled. “But when is there ever a good time?”

“The investigation has to live independently of those kinds of concerns,” he added. “The process of self-examination might be inconvenient, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done.”

In May, the AP released a more extensive report and visual analysis with new insights – for one, as argued in The Stringer, the photograph was probably captured by a Pentax camera, not a Leica as Út has long claimed. The internal study, based on “extensive visual analysis, interviews with witnesses and examination of all available photos” concluded that it was “possible” Út took the photo. “None of this material proves anyone else did,” the AP said, thus the findings did not meet the “definitive evidence” required by its standards to change the credit. (Út, who declined to participate in The Stringer, has categorically denied the film’s claims, maintained authorship, and threatened to sue for defamation.)

Days later, World Press Photo, which awarded Napalm Girl the 1973 Photo of the Year award, released its own independent investigation concluding that two people – Nghệ and photographer Huỳnh Công Phúc – were better positioned to take the photo. The organization rescinded Út’s credit but left official authorship unknown, with an open-ended epigraph: “This remains contested history, and it is possible that the author of the photograph will never be fully confirmed.”

Findings from both investigations, including details from the AP’s archive, were used to refine the film’s own forensic analysis, conducted independently by the French NGO Index. The final version, updated from the one screened at Sundance, finds that, based on images taken by and of Út that day, the AP photographer would have had to sprint about 560ft forward, snap the famous photo, then run back 250ft, then turn around to be seen walking toward NBC News cameramen – “an extremely implausible scenario”. Nghệ, they conclude, was in the right position for the shot.

All this may seem, to outsiders, like splitting fine hairs, unnecessarily digging into the second-by-second, frame-by-frame, meter-by-meter minutiae for a photograph whose authenticity and import remains unquestioned. Indeed, reading each report, with its flurry of details and assumptions, can feel more confusing than clarifying. But the film-makers maintain that the quest of The Stringer was never about official reattributions – rather, honest reappraisals. Nguyen sees Nghệ as part of a “generation of Vietnamese who left their lives behind, and carried their stories quietly”, and who “still believe that they don’t have the agency and the space to talk about their stories from the past. In many ways, this film was about reclaiming that space, for dignity and truth and memory that is often neglected.”

“I have the utmost respect for AP and news organizations that have upheld journalism for over a century,” he added. “And so I hope that we all can look deep inside ourselves and have a reckoning when it’s necessary.”

The Stringer posits a number of overlapping, murky factors for the alleged misattribution: that the Saigon bureau was cutthroat and competitive; that stringers operate on the margins of the profession; that Faas felt some guilt over sending Út’s older brother, Huỳnh Thanh Mỹ, to his death on AP combat assignment in 1965; that Faas could get away with keeping the credit in-house because Vietnamese journalists – particularly non-employees such as Nghệ – were, as Knight put it, “outsiders in their own country” without leverage or recourse.

Knight cited a recent event with journalists in London, in which he asked attenders if they knew the names of any Vietnamese war journalists besides Nick Út. None of them did. “To be fair, I couldn’t name anyone other than Nick Út before I started this story, and I’m a student of that war,” he said. “But dozens and dozens of them were working for the foreign press.”

Part of the film’s mission, he said, was to re-examine the narration of history – how the story is told, who is doing the telling, who is given the credit. “Vietnamese journalists have really been erased from the narration of their own war,” said Knight. “And I hope that this story won’t only start to rebalance that a little bit, but will also demand of the audience that we examine who is telling today’s stories, and where the power structures in journalism lie.”

Both Nguyen and Knight state, for the record, that they have little doubt as to the authorship of the famous photo. But regardless of one’s view, Nguyen said, “I hope people come in watching the film with an open heart and open mind. I think individuals like Nghệ deserve that.”