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The image is seared into our collective unconscious. The photograph, sometimes called “Napalm Girl,” reveals nine-year-old Kim Phuc operating bare and screaming down a highway in Trang Bang, South Vietnam. Her physique has been burned by the flammable scatter of an incendiary bomb. Only moments earlier than, pilots had mistakenly dropped their fiery payload on allied positions, severely injuring civilians. So primal is the scene—an unclothed lady and 4 different kids fleeing in ache and panic previous males in uniform; a darkish sky roiling with apocalyptic bomb clouds—that it has endured for many years as an anti-war icon.
In the previous few weeks, nonetheless, the provenance of the picture has turn out to be the idea of a battle royale all its personal. That battle has primarily pitted the Associated Press and a contingent of photojournalists and correspondents in opposition to a bunch of impartial filmmakers. Their disagreement has been caused by allegations made in a brand new documentary, The Stringer, which had its world premiere on Saturday on the Sundance Film Festival. The film purports to show that former AP photojournalist Nick Ut, who for greater than half a century has been credited with taking the “Napalm Girl” image, didn’t truly take the picture. Representatives from the AP, and Ut himself, vehemently refute that declare, although none of them, as of this writing, has seen the movie.
The film asserts that the 1972 {photograph} was as a substitute made by a stringer: a Vietnamese cameraman working for NBC on the time, who submitted his undeveloped movie on a contract foundation to the Associated Press workplace in Saigon.
The AP, in response to the documentary, edited the movie, choosing a picture that was immediately acknowledged as extraordinary. The service printed what would turn out to be the well-known body, and despatched it over the newswires. The image would run in newspapers around the globe. The stringer’s brother-in-law, who says within the movie that he was additionally affiliated with NBC on the time, insists that he got here again to the bureau the following day and was given a $20 stringer price for the only body (as was frequent follow), together with a print of the image.
Nick Ut was given credit score for the picture, and ultimately gained a Pulitzer Prize for it. But within the filmmakers’ estimation, it was extra doubtless taken by Nguyen Thanh Nghe, an American-trained fight photographer and cinematographer who, as may be seen in {a photograph} proven within the film, had additionally been there the day the picture was made on Highway 1, within the village of Trang Bang.
The ensuing photographic fracas has been intense. On one facet is the Associated Press; a bunch of extremely revered veteran journalists who coated the battle in Southeast Asia; and Nick Ut (then 21, now 73), a heroic determine in Vietnam and longtime resident of the US whose lawyer tells me is contemplating litigation. “I am confident,” says lawyer James Hornstein, “that we have a strong case for defamation. In our view, it didn’t happen.” On January 15, the AP launched a 22-page critique of the premise behind the film. The report consists of the testimonies of seven witnesses who had been on the highway that day or in AP’s Saigon bureau, all of whom instructed the information group that they consider Ut took the image. The AP’s investigation lays out every part 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 text, however in an announcement to VF stated he confirmed that his AP colleagues’ “memory” is correct and “is certain he took the picture and was properly credited for doing so.”)
On the opposite facet of the controversy is filmmaker Bao Nguyen, the Vietnamese American director who made final 12 months’s The Greatest Night in Pop; Carl Robinson, the photograph editor on obligation the day of the bombing; battle photographer Gary Knight, the cofounder of the VII photograph company in addition to the movie’s narrator and government producer—who, together with Terri Lichstein, Fiona Turner, and Le Van, amassed mounds of proof in pursuit of verifying the movie’s thesis; a photographic forensics crew; and 86-year-old Nghe, who, in on-camera interviews, gives his personal account of getting taken the image—solely to have its authorship, he says, taken away from him.
On the day the photograph was captured, Nghe says within the movie, Ut was the one individual on the scene with a digital camera who was formally on workers on the AP. According to Nghe, Horst Faas, the AP’s chief of images in Saigon, who died in 2012—“the big guy,” as Nghe calls him within the movie—credited Nghe’s photograph to Ut. The swapping of the credit, in Nghe’s view, was “intentional. I knew right away.” A supply conversant in AP protocol says that stringers would give the bureau their movie, get a price, and occasionally get their names connected to their photographs.
Here’s what occurred, in response to Robinson, who was manning the photograph desk that day. “I have carried this burden for 50 years and never gone public,” he contends within the film. “Simply put, Nick didn’t really take that famous picture.”
When Robinson noticed the developed picture, displaying the youngsters operating, he says he bristled. His first response, he claims on digital camera, was: “We really can’t use that,” given the sensitivity of displaying a toddler with out garments 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 proven the print of Kim Phuc operating down the highway. 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 seek out the spelling of the stringer’s title—“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 doubtless 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 additionally on the web site when Kim Phuc got here into view. He declined to take part within the movie. His model of occasions, as associated in AP’s investigation, is incompatible with the thought of one other photographer having taken the important thing body: “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 extra, Burnett, like Ut, had his movie processed within the bureau darkroom that day. As Burnett would write in a 2012 piece for The Washington Post, he remembers 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.’”