‘We have to be able to ask difficult questions’: who actually took the enduring Napalm Girl picture? | Documentary movies

It is without doubt one of the most recognizable pictures of the twentieth century: a unadorned woman – arms huge, face contorted, pores and skin scorched and peeling – operating towards the digicam as she flees a napalm assault in South Vietnam. To her proper, a boy’s face is frozen in a Greek tragedy masks of ache. To her left, two different Vietnamese kids run away from the bombed village of Trảng Bàng. Behind them, an indistinguishable group of troopers and, behind them, a wall of black smoke.

Within hours of publication in June 1972, the picture, formally titled The Terror of War however colloquially often called Napalm Girl, went the analog model of viral; seen and mentioned by tens of millions of individuals world wide, it’s broadly credited with galvanizing public opinion in opposition to the US struggle in Vietnam. Susan Sontag later wrote that the horrifically indelible picture of nine-year-old Kim Phúc in misery “probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a hundred hours of televised barbarities”. Sir Don McCullin, the legendary British photojournalist who coated the battle, deemed it the only finest {photograph} of what would later be known as “The Television War”. Napalm Girl is, “simply put, one of the most important photographs of anything ever made, and certainly of the Vietnam war”, mentioned Gary Knight, a British photojournalist with a long time of fight pictures expertise.

For 53 years, Napalm Girl was credited to Huynh Cong “Nick” Út, a then-21-year-old South Vietnamese photojournalist working for the Associated Press in Saigon. But a controversial new documentary on Netflix argues that the enduring {photograph} lengthy thought of the top of struggle journalism – one which introduced Út a Pulitzer prize, amid different worldwide acclaim – was really taken by a distinct man on the scene in Trảng Bàng that day.

According to The Stringer, directed by Bao Nguyen and narrated by Knight, the Terror of War was really taken by a freelancer, or “stringer”, who bought his pictures to the AP. The declare, and the movie’s subsequent investigation, originates with a person named Carl Robinson, a former AP picture editor in Saigon who alleges that Horst Faas, the bureau’s legendarily domineering picture chief, ordered him to vary the picture’s credit score from the stringer to Út, the one AP employees photographer on website that day.

Robinson, now in his 80s, emailed Knight out of the blue in 2022, looking for a journalist’s assist in discovering the unknown photographer – ought to he nonetheless be alive, he mentioned, he needed to supply an apology. Knight considered the freelance photojournalists he met via his non-profit, the VII Foundation – “the stringers of today”, who, like Vietnamese freelancers throughout the struggle, are “often overlooked. Their work is often questioned. They work under much more difficult circumstances. They’re not insured. They don’t have pensions. They don’t have support. They often don’t have good equipment, and they are incredibly vulnerable photographing in their own communities.”

Knight puzzled: “What must it feel like to be the man who took this photograph, if indeed Nick Út didn’t take it?” As a photographer, he imagined, it will be terribly painful. As a pupil of photojournalism, notably the vaunted struggle pictures of Vietnam, it will be earth-shattering, maybe reputation-threatening. The hallowed legacy of the {photograph} amongst Vietnamese-Americans is such that Nguyen, whose dad and mom emigrated throughout the struggle, was hesitant to tackle the venture. “I didn’t want to disrupt this long-held narrative that Nick had taken the photograph,” he mentioned. “And I didn’t want to disrupt the status quo of a community that always looked up to this achievement.”

But each Knight and Nguyen agreed: it was price asking the query. “If journalists are going to hold everybody else in the world to account,” mentioned Knight, “we have to be able to ask difficult questions of ourselves.”

The Stringer follows Knight, together with fellow journalists Fiona Turner, Terri Lichstein and Lê Vân, as they pursue their very own investigation, from eyewitness interviews, to call-outs in present-day Ho Chi Minh City, to archival analysis from different footage taken that day (the film-makers say they weren’t given entry to the AP’s archive). Their efforts finally yield a reputation: Nguyễn Thành Nghệ, a driver for NBC that day who often bought pictures to worldwide information shops as a freelancer. In the movie, an emotional Nghệ, now additionally in his 80s and residing in California, attests that he bought the {photograph} to the AP for $20 and a print, solely to be haunted by the shortage of credit score for many years.

Nghệ seems, within the movie, reserved and considerate, however his story proved incendiary inside the world of photojournalism. Days earlier than The Stringer’s premiere on the Sundance movie pageant in January – by which an emotional Nghệ appeared as a shock visitor, assuring via a translator that “I took the photo” – the AP revealed a lengthy report disputing the movie’s account by way of its personal inner evaluation, describing Robinson as a “disgruntled” former worker, and standing by Út, who retired from a distinguished profession with the group in 2017. Several distinguished photojournalists dismissed Nghệ’s declare outright, and campaigned in opposition to the movie’s distribution; others expressed concern, given the present political surroundings, over any problem to journalistic credibility. “We had people suggesting that we should drop the investigation because it was a bad time for journalism,” Knight recalled. “But when is there ever a good time?”

“The investigation has to live independently of those kinds of concerns,” he added. “The process of self-examination might be inconvenient, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done.”

In May, the AP launched a extra in depth report and visual analysis with new insights – for one, as argued in The Stringer, the {photograph} was most likely captured by a Pentax digicam, not a Leica as Út has lengthy claimed. The inner examine, based mostly on “extensive visual analysis, interviews with witnesses and examination of all available photos” concluded that it was “possible” Út took the picture. “None of this material proves anyone else did,” the AP mentioned, thus the findings didn’t meet the “definitive evidence” required by its requirements to vary the credit score. (Út, who declined to take part in The Stringer, has categorically denied the movie’s claims, maintained authorship, and threatened to sue for defamation.)

Days later, World Press Photo, which awarded Napalm Girl the 1973 Photo of the Year award, launched its personal unbiased investigation concluding that two individuals – Nghệ and photographer Huỳnh Công Phúc – have been higher positioned to take the picture. The group rescinded Út’s credit score however left official authorship unknown, with an open-ended epigraph: “This remains contested history, and it is possible that the author of the photograph will never be fully confirmed.”

Findings from each investigations, together with particulars from the AP’s archive, have been used to refine the movie’s personal forensic evaluation, carried out independently by the French NGO Index. The closing model, up to date from the one screened at Sundance, finds that, based mostly on pictures taken by and of Út that day, the AP photographer would have needed to dash about 560ft ahead, snap the well-known picture, then run again 250ft, then flip round to be seen strolling towards NBC News cameramen – “an extremely implausible scenario”. Nghệ, they conclude, was in the best place for the shot.

All this will appear, to outsiders, like splitting superb hairs, unnecessarily digging into the second-by-second, frame-by-frame, meter-by-meter trivia for {a photograph} whose authenticity and import stays unquestioned. Indeed, studying every report, with its flurry of particulars and assumptions, can really feel extra complicated than clarifying. But the film-makers keep that the search of The Stringer was by no means about official reattributions – quite, trustworthy reappraisals. Nguyen sees Nghệ as a part of a “generation of Vietnamese who left their lives behind, and carried their stories quietly”, and who “still believe that they don’t have the agency and the space to talk about their stories from the past. In many ways, this film was about reclaiming that space, for dignity and truth and memory that is often neglected.”

“I have the utmost respect for AP and news organizations that have upheld journalism for over a century,” he added. “And so I hope that we all can look deep inside ourselves and have a reckoning when it’s necessary.”

The Stringer posits numerous overlapping, murky components for the alleged misattribution: that the Saigon bureau was cutthroat and aggressive; that stringers function on the margins of the occupation; that Faas felt some guilt over sending Út’s older brother, Huỳnh Thanh Mỹ, to his dying on AP fight project in 1965; that Faas may get away with holding the credit score in-house as a result of Vietnamese journalists – notably non-employees akin to Nghệ – have been, as Knight put it, “outsiders in their own country” with out leverage or recourse.

Knight cited a latest occasion with journalists in London, by which he requested attenders in the event that they knew the names of any Vietnamese struggle journalists in addition to Nick Út. None of them did. “To be fair, I couldn’t name anyone other than Nick Út before I started this story, and I’m a student of that war,” he mentioned. “But dozens and dozens of them were working for the foreign press.”

Part of the movie’s mission, he mentioned, was to re-examine the narration of historical past – how the story is informed, who’s doing the telling, who’s given the credit score. “Vietnamese journalists have really been erased from the narration of their own war,” mentioned Knight. “And I hope that this story won’t only start to rebalance that a little bit, but will also demand of the audience that we examine who is telling today’s stories, and where the power structures in journalism lie.”

Both Nguyen and Knight state, for the file, that they’ve little doubt as to the authorship of the well-known picture. But no matter one’s view, Nguyen mentioned, “I hope people come in watching the film with an open heart and open mind. I think individuals like Nghệ deserve that.”