Who Really Took the Renowned “Napalm Girl” Photograph?

The picture is seared into our collective unconscious. The photo, often referred to as “Napalm Girl,” shows nine-year-old Kim Phuc running naked and screaming down a road in Trang Bang, South Vietnam. Her body has been burned by the flammable scatter of an incendiary bomb. Only moments before, pilots had mistakenly dropped their fiery payload on allied positions, severely injuring civilians. So primal is the scene—an unclothed girl and four other children fleeing in pain and panic past men in uniform; a obscure sky roiling with apocalyptic bomb clouds—that it has endured for decades as an anti-war icon.

In the past few weeks, however, the provenance of the image has become the basis of a battle royale all its own. That battle has essentially pitted the Associated Press and a contingent of photojournalists and correspondents against a group of independent filmmakers. Their disagreement has been brought about by allegations made in a modern documentary, The Stringer, which had its world premiere on Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival. The movie purports to prove that former AP photojournalist Nick Ut, who for more than half a century has been credited with taking the “Napalm Girl” picture, did not actually take the image. Representatives from the AP, and Ut himself, vehemently refute that claim, though none of them, as of this writing, has seen the film.

The movie asserts that the 1972 photograph was instead made by a stringer: a Vietnamese cameraman working for NBC at the time, who submitted his undeveloped film on a freelance basis to the Associated Press office in Saigon.

The AP, according to the documentary, edited the film, selecting an image that was instantly recognized as extraordinary. The service printed what would become the eminent frame, and sent it over the newswires. The picture would run in newspapers around the world. The stringer’s brother-in-law, who says in the film that he was also affiliated with NBC at the time, insists that he came back to the bureau the next day and was given a $20 stringer fee for the single frame (as was common practice), along with a print of the picture.

Nick Ut was given credit for the image, and eventually won a Pulitzer Prize for it. But in the filmmakers’ estimation, it was more likely taken by Nguyen Thanh Nghe, an American-trained combat photographer and cinematographer who, as can be seen in a photograph shown in the movie, had also been there the day the image was made on Highway 1, in the village of Trang Bang.

The resulting photographic fracas has been intense. On one side is the Associated Press; a group of highly respected veteran journalists who covered the war in Southeast Asia; and Nick Ut (then 21, now 73), a heroic figure in Vietnam and longtime resident of the US whose lawyer tells me is considering litigation. “I am confident,” says attorney James Hornstein, “that we have a strong case for defamation. In our view, it didn’t happen.” On January 15, the AP released a 22-page critique of the premise behind the movie. The report includes the testimonies of seven witnesses who were on the road that day or in AP’s Saigon bureau, all of whom told the news organization that they believe Ut took the picture. The AP’s investigation lays out everything from smoke and wind patterns that day to its darkroom labeling system. Its conclusion: “In the absence of new, convincing evidence to the contrary, the AP has no reason to believe anyone other than Ut took the photo.” (Ut declined a request to be interviewed for this article, but in a statement to VF said he confirmed that his AP colleagues’ “memory” is true and “is certain he took the picture and was properly credited for doing so.”)

On the other side of the debate is filmmaker Bao Nguyen, the Vietnamese American director who made last year’s The Greatest Night in Pop; Carl Robinson, the photo editor on duty the day of the bombing; conflict photographer Gary Knight, the cofounder of the VII photo agency as well as the film’s narrator and executive producer—who, along with Terri Lichstein, Fiona Turner, and Le Van, amassed mounds of evidence in pursuit of verifying the film’s thesis; a photographic forensics team; and 86-year-old Nghe, who, in on-camera interviews, provides his own account of having taken the picture—only to have its authorship, he says, taken away from him.

On the day the photo was captured, Nghe says in the film, Ut was the only person at the scene with a camera who was officially on staff at the AP. According to Nghe, Horst Faas, the AP’s chief of photography in Saigon, who died in 2012—“the big guy,” as Nghe calls him in the film—credited Nghe’s photo to Ut. The swapping of the credits, in Nghe’s view, was “intentional. I knew right away.” A source familiar with AP protocol says that stringers would give the bureau their film, get a fee, and on occasion get their names attached to their photos.

Here’s what happened, according to Robinson, who was manning the photo desk that day. “I have carried this burden for 50 years and never gone public,” he contends in the movie. “Simply put, Nick didn’t really take that famous picture.”

When Robinson saw the developed image, showing the children running, he says he bristled. His first reaction, he claims on camera, was: “We really can’t use that,” given the sensitivity of showing a child without clothes on. “The full-on front picture was from a stringer. I checked his name. There was a picture from Nick Ut that showed the girl running by, from a side angle, and that was actually my pick, because it was discrete.” When Robinson’s boss, Faas, returned from his lunch break, he was shown the print of Kim Phuc running down the road. Robinson says, “He saw that, and he was like—bang—‘That’s what we’re going with.’ There was no question about it. It was his call. And he was the boss.”

“And then I started writing the caption. I was getting to the end of it. I had about four lines. You put ‘STF/’ for a staff photographer and for a stringer you put ‘STR/,’ and the name. And I glanced over to the notebook”—to find the spelling of the stringer’s name—“and Horst Faas, who had been standing right next to me said, ‘Nick Ut. Make it ‘Nick Ut.’ Make it ‘staff.’ Make it Nick Ut.’ And those have been with me the rest of my life, those words…. I’ve always felt bad about that my whole life that I didn’t, that I wasn’t courageous enough.”

The likely photographer, he continues, “was an unfamiliar stringer. He wasn’t part of our regular army of stringers. It wasn’t a name I was familiar with, so I didn’t remember it.”

Photojournalist David Burnett, then 25, was also at the site when Kim Phuc came into view. He declined to participate in the film. His version of events, as related in AP’s investigation, is incompatible with the idea of another photographer having taken the key frame: “Burnett saw Ut…sprint ahead of the others and start taking photos as Kim Phuc and other children emerged from the smoke…. ‘There’s nothing that ever has given me pause to think that Nick didn’t shoot that picture,’ [Burnett] said.” What’s more, Burnett, like Ut, had his film processed in the bureau darkroom that day. As Burnett would write in a 2012 piece for The Washington Post, he recalls the scene: “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.’”