PARK CITY – Sundance always holds surprises in store, and Saturday night a documentary about one of the most famous war photographs ever taken – a Vietnamese girl running naked from a napalm bombing of her village in 1972 – stunned the audience with its conclusion: the photo was taken by a freelance Vietnamese photographer rather than Nick Ut, the Associated Press photographer credited with the image for the past 50 years.
“I took the photo,” said Nguyen Thanh Nghe, who came to the screening from his home in California, in a Q&A after the screening of “The Stringer” by director Bao Nguyen (“The Greatest Night in Pop”).
Ut would not comment to the filmmakers.
The moving panel discussion followed the film which begins with a confession by the former Saigon photo editor at the Associated Press during the Vietnam War, Carl Robinson, that he has carried the knowledge that the photo by an unknown local freelancer – called a “stringer” – was instead attributed to an AP staff photographer on that day in 1972.
“I didn’t want to die before this story came out,” said Robinson at the Q&A. “I wanted to say sorry [to Nghe]. After COVID I looked straight on and I said, ‘It had to be Nghe.’ …I wanted to find him and talk, just the two of us. And I did.”
In the film, journalist Gary Knight leads a group of colleagues who set out to unravel the mystery of the photo, test the veracity of Robinson’s confession and his allegation that AP’s chief photographer Horst Faas made the real-time decision to credit Ut that was never challenged – and to find the stringer.
Ut went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and accept accolades for five decades for the photo of nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc and her family members running in terror from the napalm bombs of the South Vietnamese army, her clothing and skin burned off.
The photo’s sheer horror is credited with helping to turn public opinion definitively against the war. It forced the American public to face the devastation that the war wrought on the Vietnamese.
The investigative journalists hopscotched around the world to find Vietnamese family members, former Western correspondents and forensic experts who analyzed the videos and photos on that day to try and get to the truth. While Nguyen’s name was quietly passed around among Vietnamese journalists as the actual author, he was unknown in the West, until a Facebook inquiry surfaced him to the filmmakers.
As the film explains, Ut was at the village the day it was bombed, along with other American news crews and military freelance photographers. The film makes a thoroughly convincing case that Ut did not take the photo, although he took many other remarkable photos on that day, including of the little girl but from a different and less impactful angle.
Nguyen had gone with the NBC crew as a driver, but was a trained photographer with a certificate from the American military.
When Faas and Robinson looked at all the images they had, they chose the shocking frontal nude photo. Robinson wrote the caption and Faas instructed him to credit Nick Ut. “I didn’t argue. I just did it. I wasn’t courageous enough” to challenge Faas.
Nguyen said he never dared raise the issue of authorship, since he had no proof that he took the photo (his wife destroyed the print he was given by the AP on the day he sold the film) and thought no one would believe him.
The apparently falsified authorship of the photo unearths deeper questions about whether Western news organizations exploited local journalists, and cared little about attributing credit to a freelancer when they could claim it for the news organization itself. All of those interviewed said that credit was not considered important at the time.
But a Vietnamese staffer for NBC (whose office was next door to the AP) corroborated that Faas bought the film from him that day, on behalf of Nguyen. And he handed him a print of the image to give to Nguyen. His silence has also plagued him for decades. “My conscience is not at peace,” said the staffer named Than, but he could not afford to lose his job and push back against the powerful Faas, he said.
Faas has now died, and could not be consulted for a response. The AP met off the record with the filmmakers to look at the evidence, and issued a statement that the news organization saw no reason to doubt that Ut took the photo.
