JOSEPH CAMPBELL: More Likely Than Not, Nick Ut Took ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo.

I attended a screening the other day (June 15) of “The Stringer,” a provocative film that challenges authorship of the famous “Napalm Girl” photo, taken in Vietnam in June 1972.

I remain unpersuaded by the film’s centerpiece claim that a Vietnamese photographer other than Nick Ut of the Associated Press took the image, formally known as “The Terror of War.” The photo shows a cluster of frightened Vietnamese children, fleeing a misdirected air strike on their village, Trang Bang. At the center of the photograph is a wounded and naked 9-year-old girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc.

The weight of the evidence – including accounts by journalists who were at Trang Bang when the photo was made – still points to Ut’s authorship of the photograph, which won a Pulitzer Prize. More likely than not, the soft-spoken Ut took the image, as he says he did, despite claims to the contrary generated by the film more than 50 years afterward.

Read the whole thing.