Controversy rages over who really took infamous Vietnam War photo

More than half a century later the ‘napalm girl’ is the focus of a bitter dispute among some of the biggest names in photojournalism.

Vietnamese children flee a napalm attack in the famous photo. Now controversy is raging over who took the shot.

The shot of a young Vietnamese girl fleeing burnt and naked from an incendiary attack on her village outside Saigon on June 8, 1972, has become one of the defining photographs of the horrors of war.

More than half a century later the “napalm girl” is the focus of a bitter dispute among some of the biggest names in photojournalism.

On one side are the many friends and supporters of Nick Ut, the Vietnamese-American photographer credited with taking the image for US news agency Associated Press. Confronting them are a group of filmmakers and photographers who are convinced that the photograph, for which Ut won a Pulitzer Prize, was taken by ­another Vietnamese man, who was robbed of the credit for his work.

In a documentary, they argue that the image was taken by Nguyen Thanh Nghe, a freelancer or stringer, who was also present at the atrocity on Vietnam’s Highway 1 near Trang Bang. Their film, The Stringer, premiered this month at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah.

“I worked hard for (the photograph),” Nghe says in the film. “But that guy (Ut) got to have it all. He got recognition. He got awards. He was celebrated in Vietnam.”

AP has countered with a 23-page report denying the claims made in the documentary.

The ­effort to discredit Ut, 73, who has travelled the world using the photograph to campaign for peace, has infuriated his friends and supporters. “I could cry! This makes my blood boil!” wrote Yunghi Kim, a veteran Korean-American photographer.

“More than 50 years later, pointing fingers in the name of ‘truth, justice and morals’, they’ve targeted an innocent Asian photographer, 21 years old at the time of the Vietnam War. The sweetest man ... is caught in the middle in a maligning, slanderous campaign.”

The photo was taken after the South Vietnamese armed forces mistakenly dropped napalm on Trang Bang. Terrified and badly burnt villagers fled down the road, including Phan Thi Kim Phuc, then 9, who is in the centre of the photograph, naked and screaming.

The image was published by newspapers and magazines around the world, and contributed to the international movement of protest against the war. Her brother, 3, died after the attack, but Kim Phuc, now 61, recovered, settled in Canada with her husband and children and became a UNESCO goodwill ambassador.

If the broad outlines of the atrocity are clear, the circumstances surrounding the photograph have been muddied by the documentary, presented by Gary Knight of the photo agency VII. Carl Robinson, an editor in the AP bureau at the time, now 81, claims that his boss, the late, celebrated photographer Horst Faas, told him to credit the photo to Ut rather than to Nghe.

The filmmakers speculate that this may have been because he preferred credit to go to a member of the agency’s staff, and that he felt guilty over Ut’s brother, also a photographer, who had been killed on assignment for AP seven years earlier. “I have carried this burden for 50 years and never gone public,” Robinson says. “Simply put, Nick didn’t really take that famous picture.”

Robinson was sacked by AP in 1978 over unrelated matters. He has never publicly told the story before, and the agency’s report suggests that he may be motivated by resentment against his former employer.

It quotes Peter Arnett, a distinguished Vietnam War correspondent, who says “maybe (the motivation) is jealousy ... (He said) that he was disturbed by Nick Ut’s growing reputation as a photographer with the Los Angeles AP ­bureau. ‘He’s gone all Hollywood, I don’t like that’.”

The report presents testimony by other witnesses who insist that Ut was correctly credited. Among his supporters is Kim Phuc herself, the girl in the photograph. “I have refused to participate in this outrageous and false attack on Nick Ut raised by Mr Robinson over the past years,” she told Vanity Fair. “[Ut] was not just a photographer. He is my hero for putting down his camera and taking me to the hospital that day and saving my life.”

The Times