"Napalm Girl" (Again)

     Back in 2022 there were many stories about the photograph of a naked girl running down a road in Vietnam. It had been taken fifty years before and it appeared on the front pages of many newspapers in the summer of 1972. You will be spared from seeing the photo here, but if you want to view it, see the post I did about the "Napalm Girl" and the 50th anniversary of that photo. 
  Prurience or sensationalism were certainly not the motivators behind that post, nor are they now.  I chose the subject because the "Napalm Girl" is Kim Phuc, who is living in Ontario and wants her story to be known. She and here husband were actively involved in promoting peace and supporting refugees. See Napalm Girl for all the details. 
  The picture is very much in the news again, which is why I am posting about it, yet again. I will summarize the current publicity about the picture and provide the sources you need to read about the issue involved.
   There is no dispute about the authenticity of the photograph, but a controversy has developed about who took it. A documentary appearing at the Sundance Festival with the title, "The Stringer", claims that a stringer, Nguyen Thanh Nghe, took the picture, not the AP staff photographer, Nick Ut, who won a Pulitzer Prize for it. Details about how the film was attributed are apparently outlined in the documentary and are discussed elsewhere, including in a 23 page report by the AP (provided below.) The AP stands by the photo as does Ut and Kim Phuc: 
  "In a statement to CBC, Kim Phuc said she doesn't have a clear memory of the day where she was burned, but rejected claims raised in The Stringer. She said she clearly remembered Ut as the only journalist willing to stop shooting to take her to a nearby burn unit, saving her life. That combined with memories from her family and other eyewitnesses, she wrote, convinced her of Ut's role." 
The source for that statement and others are included at the end of this post.

Another Photo
   Since the authenticity of the photograph of the "Napalm Girl" is not questioned, I will turn briefly to another picture from Viet Nam which was also widely displayed. It was taken on Feb.1,1968 and on its 50th anniversary there were also many stories about it.  Although it was taken four years before "Napalm Girl" and both photos were important, the Vietnam War continued for many more years and that leads one to question somewhat, the title of this article: "A Photo That Changed the Course of the Vietnam War," Maggie Astor, New York Times, Feb.1, 2018.
   "Fifty years ago today, the national police chief of South Vietnam calmly approached a prisoner in the middle of a Saigon street and fired a bullet into his head. A few feet away stood Eddie Adams, an Associated Press photographer, eye to his viewfinder. On a little piece of black-and-white film, he captured the exact moment of the gunshot.... By morning, this last instant of his life would be immortalized on the front pages of newspapers nationwide, including The New York Times. Along with NBC film footage, the image gave Americans a stark glimpse of the brutality of the Vietnam War and helped fuel a decisive shift in public opinion. “It hit people in the gut in a way that only a visual text can do,” said Michelle Nickerson, an associate professor of history at Loyola University Chicago who has studied the antiwar movement during the Vietnam era. “The photo translated the news of Tet in a way that you can’t quantify in terms of how many people were, at that moment, turned against the war.... A police chief had fired a bullet, point-blank, into the head of a handcuffed man, in likely violation of the Geneva Conventions. And the official was not a Communist, but a member of South Vietnam’s government, the ally of the United States.
“You can talk about ‘the execution photograph from the Vietnam War,’ and not just the generation who lived through it but multiple generations can call that image to mind,” said Susan D. Moeller, the author of “Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat,” and a professor of media and international affairs at the University of Maryland. “It was immediately understood to be an icon.”

Sources: 
  The AP Report has the photograph on its cover: "Investigating Claims Around 'The Terror of War' Photograph," Jan. 15, 2025.
["The Napalm Girl" photograph is also known as "The Terror of War" photograph.]
   “For the past six months, aware that a film challenging this historical record was in production, the AP has conducted its own painstaking research, which supports the historical account that Ut was the photographer. In the absence of new, convincing evidence to the contrary, the AP has no reason to believe anyone other than Ut took the photo.”
   "Sundance Doc, 'The Stringer' Challenges Who Took Napalm Girl Photgraph," Lindsey Bahr, AP, Jan.27, 2025
   "Controversial Doc, 'The Stringer' Investigates Famous Vietnam War Photo,Jada Yuan, Washington Post, Jan.27, 2025.
   " 'Napalm Girl' Photographer Nick Ut, Responds to Claim That He Didn't Take Famous Photo: 'A Slap in the Face', Tracy Brown, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 12, 2025.