NAPALM GIRL, THEN AND NOW: Who took the napalm girl photo? Inside the bitter dispute over iconic image.
The image of a young Vietnamese girl, fleeing burnt and naked from an incendiary attack on her village outside Saigon on June 8, 1972, has become one of the defining photographs of the horrors of war.
Now, more than half a century later, the “napalm girl” photograph is the focus of a bitter dispute among some of the biggest personalities and institutions in photojournalism.
On one side are the many friends and supporters of Nick Ut, the Vietnamese-American photographer credited with taking the unforgettable image for the US news agency the Associated Press (AP).
Confronting them are a group of film-makers and photographers who are convinced that the photograph, for which Ut was awarded a Pulitzer prize, was actually taken by another Vietnamese man, who was robbed of credit for his work.
In a documentary, they argue that the famous image was taken by Nguyen Thanh Nghe, a freelance photographer, or stringer, who was also present at the site of the atrocity on Vietnam’s Highway 1 near Trang Bang. The film about the case, The Stringer, premiered this month at the Sundance Film Festival.
“I worked hard for [the photograph],” Nghe says in the film. “But that guy [Ut] got to have it all. He got recognition. He got awards. He was celebrated in Vietnam.”
AP has countered with a 23-page report refuting the claims made in the documentary. The effort to discredit Ut, 73, who has travelled the world using the photograph to campaign for peace, has been met with a furious response from his friends and supporters.
Here’s a link to the AP report: Investigating claims around ‘The Terror of War’ photograph.
• According to an oral history with Ut, conducted by AP Corporate Archives Director Valerie Komor and retired Special Correspondent Linda Deutsch in Los Angeles on May 15, 2016, when he developed the film, Ishizaki saw that Kim Phuc was naked, and asked Ut why she had no clothes and why he would take a photo of a naked girl. Ut explained to him that she had been burned by napalm and had removed her burning garments. Ishizaki recognized the significance of the image, and a disagreement ensued between him and Robinson on whether it should be sent to New York.
At this point, Ishizaki instructed an office employee to fetch Faas from the nearby Royal Hotel where he was having lunch with AP correspondent Peter Arnett, to tell him that Ut had returned from the field with photos that Faas should see. On returning with Arnett, Faas looked at the image, saw its power, asked why it had not been dispatched already, and ordered the image to be transmitted to New York. He also congratulated Ut on his work.
• Robinson, as photo editor and caption writer on duty, would have typed out the photo caption that credited the image to Ut. When he was interviewed for AP Corporate Archives on May 2, 2005, about his experience working for the AP in Vietnam, he made no mention of any dispute about the origin of the photo.
• Burnett was at the AP bureau where his and Ut’s film from the day was being processed. “Then, out from the darkroom stepped Nick Ut, holding a small, still-wet copy of his best picture: a 5-by-7 print of Kim Phuc running with her brothers to escape the burning napalm. We were the first eyes to see that picture; it would be another full day before the rest of the world would see it on virtually every newspaper’s Page 1,” Burnett wrote in a column in the Washington Post.35 Speaking to AP, Burnett recalled Faas then saying, “You do good work today Nick Ut.”
• Kim Phuc, the subject of the photo, says that while she has no memories of the attack, her uncle, who was an eyewitness to the events on that day, confirmed that Ut took the photograph. In a statement given to the AP by Ut’s lawyer, she said that Ut then took her and her 5-year-old brother to the hospital after her uncle begged him for help.
Whoever took it, as Joseph Campbell noted in 2022, plenty of media myths have built up over this legendary image, not least of which was that it involved an American attack:
Christopher Wain, a veteran British journalist, wrote in a dispatch for United Press International: “These were South Vietnamese planes dropping napalm on South Vietnamese peasants and troops.”
The myth of American culpability at Trang Bang began taking hold during the 1972 presidential campaign, when Democratic candidate George McGovern referred to the photograph in a televised speech. The napalm that badly burned Kim Phuc, he declared, had been “dropped in the name of America.”
McGovern’s metaphoric claim anticipated similar assertions, including Susan Sontag’s statement in her 1973 book “On Photography,” that Kim Phuc had been “sprayed by American napalm.”
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Two other, related media myths rest on assumptions that “Napalm Girl” was so powerful that it must have exerted powerful effects on its audiences. These myths claim that the photograph hastened an end to the war and that it turned U.S. public opinion against the conflict.
Neither is accurate.
Although most U.S. combat forces were out of Vietnam by the time Ut took the photograph, the war went on for nearly three more years. The end came in April 1975, when communist forces overran South Vietnam and seized its capital.
Americans’ views about the war had turned negative long before June 1972, as measured by a survey question the Gallup Organization posed periodically. The question – essentially a proxy for Americans’ views about Vietnam – was whether sending U.S. troops there had been a mistake. When the question was first asked in summer 1965, only 24% of respondents said yes, sending in troops had been a mistake.
But by mid-May 1971 – more than a year before “Napalm Girl” was made – 61% of respondents said yes, sending troops had been mistaken policy.
In short, public opinion turned against the war long before “Napalm Girl” entered popular consciousness.
Read the whole thing.
