A Media mystery: Who really took the Napalm Girl Photo?
A Media mystery: Who really took the Napalm Girl Photo?
By Denise Chong
Of all the iconic images of war, the photo of the “napalm girl” Kim Phuc taken on a road in the hamlet of Trang Bang in South Vietnam on June 8, 1972, remains perhaps the most famous. A new documentary, The Stringer, asserts that credit for the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo belongs to a previously unknown Vietnamese stringer, not Associated Press photographer Nick Ut. In the 53 years since it was taken, Ut and Kim Phuc, who subsequently became a UNESCO advocate for peace and reconciliation, have become synonymous with the famous photo.
I first heard this rumour when I was working on my book, The Girl in the Picture: The Story of Kim Phuc, the Photograph and the Vietnam War, published in 1999, seven years after Kim Phuc’s defection from Vietnam to Canada. I’d interviewed Ut about his coverage of the napalm strike in Trang Bang. He was among the journalists that day watching from afar fighting between the South Vietnamese army and the North Vietnamese when a South Vietnamese plane – clearly off course – came in low over the road and dropped napalm bombs on its own army’s positions. A few minutes later, as the thick smoke began to clear, a half dozen children came running out.
Ut told me of how, once he’d shot his day’s photos, he was anxious to get the undeveloped film back to the AP bureau in Saigon before nightfall, the hour of the Viet Cong. How he’d agreed to take the severely burned victim – Kim Phuc – in his driver’s van and deliver her to a hospital en route.
My manuscript was almost ready for publication when I heard an astonishing accusation. It was relayed by a contact of Carl Robinson, who at the time the photo was taken was the junior photo editor in AP’s bureau in Saigon. Robinson did not believe Ut took the picture. On that day, Robinson and the dark room technician looked over photos developed off rolls of film shot by Ut and by stringers. Once Robinson’s boss, the photojournalist Horst Faas, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, selected the napalm girl photo, his job was to compose the caption and add the credit. The caption done, he expected to add a stringer’s name. Instead, he did as Faas directed: he typed in the name of the AP staffer, Nick Ut. I was stunned.
A writer has to decide early on what the book they want to write is about. What Horst Faas had said to me about why he’d chosen that particular photo had given me clarity: “Pain keeps you conscious. It’s a picture that doesn’t rest.”
Ultimately, I did not include Robinson’s contention. The story I told was about Kim Phuc and the photo as an organizing presence in her life, which would also bring into focus the upheaval war visited on the everyday life in South Vietnam.
I waited what turned out to be decades for the allegation to resurface. Three years ago, I received a call from Terri Lichstein, a documentary producer. She, Fiona Wright, and Gary Knight, who would later narrate The Stringer, were chasing a rumour that the napalm girl photo was miscredited. Lichstein said she had discerned a cautious ambiguity in my book.
I openly shared my research with the documentary’s producers and with the Associated Press. AP, willing to correct the record if justified, conducted a meticulous months-long investigation, which it subsequently published.
Like others, including AP, I saw The Stringer only when it premiered. It laid out how, relying on forensic imaging to recreate the sequence of Kim Phuc running down the road, only the freelancer, Nguyen Thanh Nghe, named for the first time, could have been in position to capture that moment. Timed with the release of the documentary, AP issued a statement, concluding that there was “no definitive evidence” to change the credit.
Faas died in 2012 and was never confronted with Robinson’s allegation.
What do I think now, having viewed The Stringer? Discrepancies between the documentary and AP’s analysis suggest that definitive credit is impossible. Regardless, the moment the napalm girl photo was sent around the world, Ut and Kim Phuc were marked for fame. In that sense, if he was not the photographer, Nick Ut becomes another casualty of the war.
In the end, I’ve alighted on a wider truth of the napalm girl photo. As long as the cycle of conflicts repeat, it won’t rest. The pain and terror in the face of Kim Phuc forces us to reflect on the moral ambiguity of war. If we appropriate responsibility, it’s because of a collective guilt we carry in the face of the wrongdoing, the evil, and the destructiveness of war.
Glebe author Denise Chong’s latest book, Out of Darkness, recently won the Ottawa Book Award for non-fiction. This piece was first published in The Globe and Mail.