Who Really Took the Famous “Napalm Girl” Photograph?

The picture is seared into our collective unconscious. The photo, often referred to as “Napalm Girl,” shows nine-year-old Kim Phuc running naked and screaming down a road in Trang Bang, South Vietnam. Her body has been burned by the flammable scatter of an incendiary bomb. Only moments before, pilots had mistakenly dropped their fiery payload on allied positions, severely injuring civilians. So primal is the scene—an unclothed girl and four other children fleeing in pain and panic past men in uniform; a dark sky roiling with apocalyptic bomb clouds—that it has endured for decades as an anti-war icon.

In the past few weeks, however, the provenance of the image has become the basis of a battle royale all its own. That battle has essentially pitted the Associated Press and a contingent of photojournalists and correspondents against a group of independent filmmakers. Their disagreement has been brought about by allegations made in a new documentary, The Stringer, which had its world premiere on Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival. The movie purports to prove that former AP photojournalist Nick Ut, who for more than half a century has been credited with taking the “Napalm Girl” picture, did not actually take the image. Representatives from the AP, and Ut himself, vehemently refute that claim, though none of them, as of this writing, has seen the film.

The movie asserts that the 1972 photograph was instead made by a stringer: a Vietnamese cameraman working for NBC at the time, who submitted his undeveloped film on a freelance basis to the Associated Press office in Saigon.

The AP, according to the documentary, edited the film, selecting an image that was instantly recognized as extraordinary. The service printed what would become the famous frame, and sent it over the newswires. The picture would run in newspapers around the world. The stringer’s brother-in-law, who says in the film that he was also affiliated with NBC at the time, insists that he came back to the bureau the next day and was given a $20 stringer fee for the single frame (as was common practice), along with a print of the picture.

Nick Ut was given credit for the image, and eventually won a Pulitzer Prize for it. But in the filmmakers’ estimation, it was more likely taken by Nguyen Thanh Nghe, an American-trained combat photographer and cinematographer who, as can be seen in a photograph shown in the movie, had also been there the day the image was made on Highway 1, in the village of Trang Bang.

The resulting photographic fracas has been intense. On one side is the Associated Press; a group of highly respected veteran journalists who covered the war in Southeast Asia; and Nick Ut (then 21, now 73), a heroic figure in Vietnam and longtime resident of the US whose lawyer tells me is considering litigation. “I am confident,” says attorney James Hornstein, “that we have a strong case for defamation. In our view, it didn’t happen.” On January 15, the AP released a 22-page critique of the premise behind the movie. The report includes the testimonies of seven witnesses who were on the road that day or in AP’s Saigon bureau, all of whom told the news organization that they believe Ut took the picture. The AP’s investigation lays out everything 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 article, but in a statement to VF said he confirmed that his AP colleagues’ “memory” is accurate and “is certain he took the picture and was properly credited for doing so.”)

On the other side of the debate is filmmaker Bao Nguyen, the Vietnamese American director who made last year’s The Greatest Night in Pop; Carl Robinson, the photo editor on duty the day of the bombing; conflict photographer Gary Knight, the cofounder of the VII photo agency as well as the film’s narrator and executive producer—who, along with Terri Lichstein, Fiona Turner, and Le Van, amassed mounds of evidence in pursuit of verifying the film’s thesis; a photographic forensics team; and 86-year-old Nghe, who, in on-camera interviews, provides his own account of having taken the picture—only to have its authorship, he says, taken away from him.

On the day the photo was captured, Nghe says in the film, Ut was the only person at the scene with a camera who was officially on staff at the AP. According to Nghe, Horst Faas, the AP’s chief of photography in Saigon, who died in 2012—“the big guy,” as Nghe calls him in the film—credited Nghe’s photo to Ut. The swapping of the credits, in Nghe’s view, was “intentional. I knew right away.” A source familiar with AP protocol says that stringers would give the bureau their film, get a fee, and on occasion get their names attached to their photos.

The Washington Post, he recalls 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.’”

In a phone conversation, Burnett, a veteran photojournalist for Time and Life, insists that his recollection of what happened next is indelible: “Carl [Robinson] says that Horst said, ‘Put Nick’s name on it.’ I remember [Horst saying,] ‘You do good work today, Nick Ut.’ That’s verbatim what was said that day. We all heard it.” The implication: Faas would not have uttered those words had he been involved in any photo-credit chicanery.

Robinson kept his account to himself, he told me in an email, until he and the AP “parted company” in the late ’70s and he quietly began discussing the incident with intimates—“but not very widely. On a trip to [the] US in 83 I mentioned it to a couple former colleagues in LA but swore them to secrecy.” Over the years, he says, he related the credit-switch accusation “one-on-one and confidentially…. I told David Burnett the story at a reunion in DC in 2011.” Burnett confirms this but says, “I didn’t give it much credence.”

Burnett’s recollections and skepticism undercut Robinson’s—and the film’s—storyline. So, too, do important statements in the Associated Press probe. According to the AP’s report, a few years after Faas’s death, Robinson shared his secret with legendary war correspondent Peter Arnett, who, while working for AP, won a Pulitzer for his Vietnam coverage, and later gained renown at CNN. Robinson reportedly wrote to Arnett and “told him he didn’t want to make the claim while Faas was alive because he wanted to spare Faas any embarrassment.” Arnett, according to the AP, said he did his own canvassing at the time and found the assertion to be without merit. Fox Butterfield, the onetime Saigon bureau chief for The New York Times as well as a Pulitzer and National Book Award winner, put it this way in the AP investigation: “It’s ridiculous to think this could be the case that Nick didn’t take the picture. It not only stretches credibility but gives stretching credibility a bad name.”

It wasn’t until December 2022, when Robinson sent a message to Gary Knight—the initial force behind the film and its onscreen protagonist—that this alternate narrative began to gain traction. Knight was intrigued upon receiving the message because back in 2010, he tells me, he had heard murmurs of Robinson’s story from someone at the AP who had been in the bureau as well, yet, in Knight’s memory, expressed doubts about the claim.

Some background is in order. Horst Faas was a revered figure in the wartime press corps. He mentored talent, ran the AP’s Saigon photo operations, and served as the news agency’s chief photographer for Southeast Asia from 1962 to 1974, winning two Pulitzers. Best known in later years for Requiem, a celebrated 1997 book and exhibition showcasing the work of photographers who had lost their lives in Vietnam and Indochina, Faas cast a large shadow.

a piece by Mark Edward Harris that delved into this connection. “Born Huynh Cong Ut in Long An, Vietnam, in 1951,” wrote Harris, “Nick lost his brother Huynh Thanh My, a debonair fellow who postponed his movie career to cover the war as a photographer for the Associated Press, in October 1965, when a Viet Cong bullet abruptly ended his life. With the help of his beloved brother’s widowed wife, Nick secured a job in the AP’s darkroom the following year and a career was born.”

It was while working for Faas that Ut’s brother lost his life. Colleagues say that Faas’s sense of loss and responsibility for his protégé wore on him heavily. “A few days after the funeral,” as the AP study points out, “14-year-old Ut turned up at the AP office in Saigon.” After a time, Faas brought him on the payroll.

The documentary only hints at why Faas might have had reason to ask Robinson to alter the photo credit, as implausible as it sounds. But when I spoke with Knight, he offered potential motivations, which serve as a subtext to the film.

Knight asks: Could Faas, with all good intentions, have requested Ut’s name be inserted—credited to a photo that Faas and his colleagues immediately felt was exceptional—as a way of helping out his young 21-year-old staffer? (Ut, according to the AP’s investigation, was using the income from his position at the bureau to help support his family.) Could Faas have done so to assuage his conscience over Nick’s brother’s death? Could it have crossed Faas’s mind that the Associated Press would get the accolades for the picture because of the STF (staff) credit, recognition that a STR (stringer) credit might not necessarily receive? All of this, of course, is conjecture.

Even so, the mystery remains. If Robinson believed that another photographer had taken the picture, he could have come forward long ago. Earlier this month, the AP’s David Bauder reported that Hornstein, Ut’s attorney, “characterized Robinson, who was dismissed by AP in 1978, as ‘a guy with a 50-year vendetta against the AP.’” Robinson emailed that, yes, he was dismissed. “It’s a cut-throat industry,” he noted. “But overall, looking back, that was the best thing that ever happened to me and start[ed] my life all over in Australia.” As for the use of the word vendetta, he added, “No, hardly. What happened has been on my conscience for all these years and I just want the truth about this photo to finally be told.”

The film does not mention that Robinson was let go. Why not? It was no secret that he had issues in the workplace. “I hated that damned photo editor’s job at AP and wanted to quit and become a freelance writer,” he wrote in his 2019 memoir. “My only self-confidence came from another joint. And in a very Taoist and Buddhist way, opium allowed me to accept the way things were. Horst Faas, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo-journalist who was my boss at AP…. He never commented when I came back to work in the afternoon stoned from the Tu Do Street house. It was no worse than his long lunches at The Royal. The late-afternoon workload quickly sobered everyone up.”

And why has Nghe been so silent? Long anonymous, he has had more than 50 years to step forward and contest the credit. But as the film relates, he says he chose not to “file a complaint” at the time, even when urged by an associate to do so. Instead, he just went on living his life.

Another nagging point: Nghe doesn’t have that long-ago photographic print to show. But in the film, he shares a personal scrapbook filled with diplomas and memorabilia. Where is “the money shot,” as Nghe describes it on camera? The answer, as conveyed in the film, is that Nghe’s then wife tore it up in disgust one day (an action recreated in the film) and, for that reason, he cannot provide hard evidence. Even if the print’s supposed disappearance is understandable—after all, Nghe fled Vietnam as a refugee in 1975—its absence is still a significant gap.

The photograph has gone on to assume a life of its own. With AP’s support, Kim Phuc and Nick Ut have been its envoys. They have traveled the globe, championing the image (originally titled “The Terror of War” when submitted for the 1973 Pulitzer) as an emblem of the dire consequences of unjust wars and of “friendly fire,” underscoring the photographer and subject’s commitment to conveying a message of peace, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Kim Phuc herself has been a Goodwill Ambassador for UNESCO. Ut has presented prints to world leaders as varied as Pope Francis and President Donald Trump.

Ut has a wide circle of friends and allies in the photo, news, and human rights communities, some of whom have known him for decades. Over the past several days, many have been in a lather about the accusations made in the film, though most of them have yet to see the documentary for themselves. Several have corroborated aspects of Ut’s account; some have defended the credentials, authority, and sterling reputation of Faas; still others have groused about Robinson, calling him a possibly disgruntled employee. It has not escaped their attention that he didn’t write about the incident in his memoir.

It is understandable that such an allegation would also raise hackles at AP. Santiago Lyon, a former vice president and director of photography at the news agency, tells me: “The AP is like a religious order. They are the Jesuits of the news business. They revere the truth. They have a pantheon of [photographic] idols: The Hindenburg. The burning monk. Iwo Jima. Eddie Adams’s Vietnam execution photo. And on and on. For somebody to come to the church and question their connection to the truth of a picture is unnerving to them.”

Recently, some of the comments from Ut’s supporters have taken on a dark aspect. Members of the film’s team have been bad-mouthed in online forums. Some say they have received vicious personal messages. In a scathing Medium post titled “In My Opinion—Prosecuting Nick Ut,” photojournalist Yunghi Kim, herself a Pulitzer finalist, has dubbed The Stringer’s director, Bao Nguyen, a “frontman” filmmaker, who is at the helm of what “appears to be an attempted slander of a beloved trailblazing Asian photographer by a group of white producers (instigators).… Pointing fingers in the name of ‘truth, justice, and morals,’ they’ve targeted an innocent Asian photographer.”

When I email Nguyen for his reaction, he acknowledges Yunghi Kim’s “right to express her views, especially given her pivotal role in shaping Asian American photojournalism.” He then makes it plain that as a son of Vietnamese war refugees himself, he considers The Stringer “a deeply personal mission. My father spent several harrowing months in a reeducation camp, and my parents lived near the historically contentious 17th parallel before finally succeeding in escaping…. These personal ties to the historical context of our film drove me to be intensely hands-on in every aspect of its creation.… Every creative decision made to tell this important narrative was infused with a sense of responsibility and privilege to uplift the stories of those like my parents—stories that have too often been forgotten or overlooked.”

He adds that the film was made “by a predominantly BIPOC and female team…. This wasn’t about filling quotas; it was about ensuring that those crafting the film had a genuine connection to the stories we were telling”—stories, he notes, that would “foster a complex yet very necessary dialogue around truth and racial injustices.”

The documentary, as Bao Nguyen implies, is also an indictment of the arrogant, some might even say colonial, mindset of an American news organization operating in a land where American forces ran the war. (The exploration of this thesis, however, is best left to another column by another writer.)

Who, then, actually took the picture?

The Stringer, through its exhaustive detective work, succeeds in making a persuasive, if circumstantial, case in Nghe’s favor. The film goes to great lengths in its attempts to show that even though Ut photographed Kim Phuc on the day in question, Ut appears not to have been in the proper position to have made the crucial frame. Forensic analysts in the documentary—using satellite imagery, still and video footage from the day, and three-dimensional models—come to the same conclusion.

But to this viewer, at least, the power of the film does not reside in the filmmakers’ investigative ingenuity. The movie rises and falls on the testimony of Nghe—and the memories movingly recounted by his family members, including his daughters and his brother-in-law, Tran Van Than. These accounts are riveting. In the midst of director Bao Nguyen’s mournful and haunting narrative—reminiscent in some ways of Malik Bendjelloul’s 2012 classic Searching for Sugar Man—Nghe’s disconsolate yet matter-of-fact tale, as well as his personal backstory, provide the strongest argument that Robinson’s contention may actually hold water.

And yet, there are several missing pieces in the movie’s narrative. Nick Ut and Kim Phuc declined to cooperate with the filmmakers. James Hornstein, Ut’s legal representative, gave VF a statement from Kim Phuc, which said, in part: “I have refused to participate in this outrageous and false attack on Nick Ut raised by Mr. Robinson over the past years…. I hope he finds peace in his life…. [Nick] 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 Associated Press declined to participate as well. The reasons behind the AP’s decision, like the claims in the film itself, are also a matter of dispute. The AP has explained in its report that it was asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement “about its own image,” which it refused to do. Knight has said the filmmakers did not require an NDA but, understandably, asked instead for an embargo until the film’s release, so that the AP wouldn’t be in a position to use The Stringer’s research in a news story that might scoop the movie.

But there are times when the film falls short, and this gives the viewer pause. First, The Stringer is ultimately unconvincing in its intimation that the news organization deliberately kept up a decades-long cover-up. Indeed, even as the news agency’s minions and allies have rallied around Ut, the Associated Press states, unequivocally: “AP stands prepared to review any evidence and take whatever remedial action might be needed if their [the filmmakers’] thesis is proved true…. AP remains committed to a truthful history of the photo, in keeping with its news values and principles.”

Second, the people who back up the AP and Ut’s arguments are no slouches. They happen to be among the most celebrated correspondents who covered the war—including Arnett, Butterfield, and Ut’s close friend and colleague, the Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer David Hume Kennerly. The credentials of these witnesses and supporters—and their history of being recognized for practicing sound, fact-driven journalism—mean their versions of “the truth” must be taken seriously.

Third, there are odd discrepancies in the stringer’s account. In the film, Nghe describes having gone to the AP bureau himself with the unexposed rolls. Yet his brother-in-law later says that he delivered the film. At another point, Nghe, as quoted above, says that the credit swap was “intentional. I knew right away”—even though he also contends that he didn’t learn about Ut’s credit and acclaim until six or seven months after the photo was published.

Finally (and this is no fault of the filmmakers, but of fate), the movie does not show Ut’s outtakes in the form of a contact sheet, by which a viewer might have been able to see, step-by-step, what Ut saw through the viewfinder. While this is unfortunate, that evidence, apparently, does not exist. Photographer Susan Meiselas, the president of the Magnum Foundation and a MacArthur Fellow, included what some consider to be Ut’s Kim Phuc contact sheet—with its 21 frames—in a Thames & Hudson book that Meiselas and others published last year called Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography. It shows not only the epic frame but also a frame next to it, which reveals most of the same people, including Kim Phuc, but several steps closer.

When I raise this with Gary Knight, his response is to dismiss it out of hand. He claims that the contact sheet in question was actually made years later from “multiple rolls of film. None of the rolls are in sequence. It doesn’t add up.” Ergo, Knight contends, there is no single Ut contact sheet from 1972.

On this, both the filmmakers and the Associated Press seem to agree. Sources close to the AP point out that the contact sheet was made in the 1990s—a composite from several rolls, for reference purposes—and was not created to give the impression to be a frame-by-frame record of the day. Ut carried multiple cameras that day.

The dichotomy of the two photographers’ claims infuses the documentary with melancholy. If Nguyen Thanh Nghe’s assertions prove to be untrue, then these imputations against Ut’s achievement will have done him a grave injustice. If Nick Ut is the one who has been unfairly credited, then for all these years, his accolades might have been Nghe’s. As one of Nghe’s daughters proclaims onscreen, quoting a lament of her father’s: “If I don’t have any evidence, then I am a zero, while the other person is a hero.”

President Nixon was trying to deny the events depicted, but he couldn’t. The credibility of the image was too strong. So the very timing of the film is troubling, coming out as a new administration takes power with an enmity toward the press, toward facts, toward the truth.”

Be that as it may, The Stringer makes the case that examining legitimate authorship matters, especially in 2025. As Gary Knight tells me, “We approached this as an exploration of authorship, not seeking this outcome. This was a serious question that needed examination.”

See the film and judge for yourself. The filmmakers may have proven their point, but maybe not. It is hardly clear-cut. And as you watch, it might be instructive to keep Occam’s Razor in mind. The 14th-century principle, by philosopher William of Ockham, maintains that when deducing how something happened, the simplest explanation—say, that Nick Ut took the photograph that has been attributed to him since 1972—is often the likeliest explanation.