‘Napalm Girl' was in the photo. But who was behind the camera?

The Age

19-05-2025

The photo is indelible, and its importance unmistakable: a Vietnamese girl burned by napalm, naked and screaming, her arms outstretched in despair. It drove home the consequences of the Vietnam War to readers in the United States, where it won a Pulitzer Prize.
But who took the photo, widely known as Napalm Girl? That is the question dividing the photojournalism community 53 years after it was taken.
The image, from a road in the village of Trang Bang, has been credited to Nick Ut, a photographer who worked for The Associated Press. In the decades since, Ut has repeatedly talked publicly, in interviews and elsewhere, about his role in capturing the photo and his later friendship with its subject, Kim Phuc Phan Thi.
Yet, a documentary that premiered this year, The Stringer, set off investigations into the creator of the image. The film argues that a freelance photographer took the image and that an AP photo editor misattributed it to Ut.
On Friday, the World Press Photo Foundation, a prominent international non-profit, weighed in. It said that a months-long investigation had found that two other photojournalists 'may have been better positioned to take the photograph than Nick Ut', and it was suspending his credit for the image. That means the credit and caption in its online archives will be updated to include the doubts raised by its investigation.
Ut's lawyer, James Hornstein, has repeatedly disputed the film's claims and called them 'defamatory'. He said in a statement that the World Press Photo decision was 'deplorable and unprofessional' and 'reveals how low the organisation has fallen'. Hornstein declined to make Ut available for an interview.
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The AP, after spending nearly a year investigating, said this month that it would continue to credit the photo to Ut. A lengthy report from the investigation said he was in position to take the photo and cites evidence to support that position, but concluded that no proof had been found. It also says other photographers were in position to take the photo, but there's no proof they did, either.
'As our report explains in great detail, there's simply not enough hard evidence or fact to remove the credit from Nick Ut, and it's impossible for anyone to know with certainty how exactly things played out on the road in the space of a few minutes over half a century ago,' said Derl McCrudden, the AP's vice president and head of global news production.