AP To Continue Crediting 'Napalm Girl' Photo To Nick Ut After Probe

Int'l Business Times

07-05-2025

The Associated Press news agency will continue to credit one of its most distinctive photos, "Napalm Girl" taken during the Vietnam War, to photographer Nick Ut despite questions about who took it, the wire said Tuesday.
The black and white photo of a severely burned Vietnamese girl, running naked down a road after a 1972 napalm attack in southern Vietnam helped alter perceptions of the war and remains a potent reminder of its devastation.
Vietnamese American AP photographer Huynh Cong Ut, better known as Nick Ut, won a Pulitzer Prize and a World Press Photo award for the image. Ut claims the photo as his own.
The photo's subject, Kim Phuc Phan Thi, who became Canadian, has continued to bear witness to her ordeal as an adult.
But in January, "The Stringer" documentary screened at the Sundance Film Festival credited the image to Vietnamese freelance journalist Nguyen Thanh Nghe.
After a nearly year-long investigation, the news agency published a 97-page report Tuesday concluding "it is possible Nick Ut took the photo."
"However, that cannot be proven definitively due to the passage of time, the death of many of the key players involved and the limitations of technology. New findings uncovered during this investigation do raise unanswered questions and AP remains open to the possibility that Ut did not take this photo," it said.
"The AP has concluded that there is not the definitive evidence required by AP's standards to change the credit of the 53-year-old photograph."
The agency concluded it is "likely" the photo was taken with a Pentax camera, while Ut stated in interviews he carried two Leica and two Nikon cameras that day.
In "The Stringer," Carl Robinson the AP's former photo editor in Saigon claimed he lied and altered the caption of the image under orders from Saigon photo chief Horst Faas.
"Nick Ut came with me on the assignment. But he didn't take that photo... That photo was mine," said Nguyen Thanh Nghe, who stated in the film that he was certain he took the photo.
AP insisted in its report "no proof has been found that Nguyen took the picture."
Ut remained with the AP for 45 years, leaving Saigon to later work for the wire in Los Angeles, until his retirement in 2017. Nick Ut, the AP staff photographer credited with the photo of a nine-year-old girl fleeing naked from a napalm strike, won a Pulitzer Prize AFP