Authorship for ‘The Terror of War’ suspended after ‘The Stringer’ doc
Bao Nguyen's latest documentary investigates the claim that the photo, often referred to "Napalm girl," was misattributed
"The Terror or War" features Phan Thi Kim Phuc (center) and other children running and South Vietnamese soldiers after a napalm attack on June 8, 1972.
Authorship currently suspended
Words by Andy Crump
Since its 1955 inception, the independent nonprofit photojournalism organization World Press Photo (WPP) hasn’t suspended attribution on even one photograph in its archive. Given such, the group’s decision on Friday to do so with “The Terror of War,” one of the most famous photographs in any archive, came as a shock. There’s a first time for everything, of course. But the WPP’s first time withholding authorship on an image concerns the Vietnam War and 53 years of subsequent Vietnamese history, tied to a picture of a girl running, naked and screaming, from a napalm strike.
Those who don’t know the name of the photograph likely know it from the description, and those who don’t know the name of the photographer may not think much of WPP’s actions. Taken on June 8, 1972, in the town of Trảng Bàng, in southeastern Vietnam, “The Terror of War” was credited to Nick Ut, a Vietnamese photographer for the Associated Press, just 21 years old and in the right place, at the right time (ghoulish though it may be to think of it that way), for making his name and securing his legacy. The 9-year-old girl, Phan Thị Kim Phúc, was part of a group of civilians and South Vietnamese soldiers bolting from a temple to the theoretical safety of positions likewise held by the South Vietnamese military. They were mistaken as enemy combatants by their own air force; the followup bombings killed several villagers as well as Phúc’s cousins.
Ut won a Pulitzer Prize for the picture, which went on to turn the tide of American public opinion against the war. It would be an exaggeration to claim “The Terror of War” ended the American War in Vietnam single handedly. But the photo did expose the United States, and the rest of the world with it, to its dreadful human cost, and played a part in escalating sociopolitical pressure on the U.S. government to cease its involvement in the conflict. Consequent to the photograph’s publication, and concurrent to its stirring, horrific power, Ut has maintained a storied, rich career ever since, with no questions raised about the veracity of the AP’s choice to credit him as author of “The Terror of War.”
That started to change in January, at the Sundance Film Festival. Rewriting Ut’s narrative wasn’t documentary filmmaker Bao Nguyen’s goal in his latest production, The Stringer, a last minute addition to the event’s lineup; all he wanted was to shine daylight on the emerging evidence that it was Nguyễn Thành Nghệ, a Vietnamese stringer—a freelancer—who took “The Terror of War,” and not Ut. “For me, every single person's story, and their truth and perspective, has value,” Nguyen tells JoySauce. “I wanted to enter (this film) with a sense of discovery.”
Like WPP, Nguyen takes great pains to emphasize that the photograph’s authenticity isn’t up for debate. What happened in June 1972 in Trảng Bàng really happened; the people, children included, who died that day were real; the burns on Phúc’s body were real, despite Richard Nixon’s sickening suggestion otherwise. (And, whether Ut took the photograph or not, he certainly did take Phúc and other children injured in the blast to a Saigon hospital, and quite likely saved their lives by doing so. That’s heroism.) But as a documentarian, asking questions, even about figures like Ut, and hearing the answers are necessities. “I think the act of listening to Nghệ’s story, and many stories of people who just didn't feel that they had the agency to tell their story, is important,” Nguyen explains.
“Nghệ didn't feel like he had the recourse to speak his perspective. He's had a long life, and this was one very important chapter in it. I'm glad we were able to find him, and tell his story to the world.”
It’s overlooked by many people outside of the Vietnamese diaspora that the “boat people” arrived in the United States as a community displaced from their homes. At best, these Vietnamese refugees were wary of sharing their experiences, and at worst, they felt disempowered from doing so. “Nghệ didn't feel like he had the recourse to speak his perspective,” Nguyen says. “He's had a long life, and this was one very important chapter in it. I'm glad we were able to find him, and tell his story to the world.” The sentiment further reinforces Nguyen’s intentions with The Stringer: not to interrogate sobering effect of “The Terror of War,” as a portrait of the victims of the American War in Vietnam, and not even to interrogate Ut’s status as its author, but to create space for Nghệ’s piece to be spoken, whether by Nghệ himself, or by Gary Knight, the photojournalist whose investigations into claims of Ut’s misattribution ultimately led to The Stringer’s production.
The case Knight makes in the film is compelling, and essentially pares down to a call made by Horst Faas, the AP’s chief of photo operations in Saigon at the time, to put Ut’s name on the photograph rather than Nghệ’s. The burden of culpability rests on the shoulders of Carl Robinson, then an AP photo editor in Saigon, who did as he was told instead of doing what Nguyen advocates for by asking questions. Robinson’s guilt makes up part of The Stringer’s soul. The cathartic release expressed by Nghệ and his family make up the rest. Neither he nor Ut were in Trảng Bàng simply to take pictures when the napalm attack happened. Thinking of them as photographers alone glazes over the grim realization that being embedded in the field means being vulnerable, and that they are intrinsically part of the history captured by “The Terror of War.” The film invites viewers to consider Ut and Nghệ as involved parties, and not as bystanders. Seeing them as such adds gravity to the matter of attribution, even if the conclusion to Knight and Robinson’s argument is tangential to Nguyen’s focus.
“For me, the act of telling Nghệ’s story and letting the audience decide who the true author of the photograph is, is validation enough for me, to be honest,” Nguyen says. “I don't need institutional attributions to validate the journey that we took with Nghệ. I’m not going to speak for (him), but from our conversations, it was always about him being able to tell his story of what happened that day, and to show that he was part of that history.” Nguyen is reluctant to take on the role of Nghệ’s advocate, worrying that doing so might pull focus from Nghệ. But he also understands that having made The Stringer, he’s now part of Nghệ’s story, and he contends with that responsibility by invoking Vietnamese American poet Ocean Vuong: “He's been saying how he's not writing stories about people, he is writing stories beside people,” Nguyen points out, “and I know that by having made this film, I am beside Nghệ, the stringer, in this journey as long as he needs me.”
The current text on “The Terror of War” reads that authorship of the photograph “remains contested history,” adding that the true identity of the photographer may never be confirmed—whether it’s Ut or Nghệ. In a vacuum, that prospect seems somewhat terrifying. But the WPP’s statement on “The Terror of War” dovetails well with Nguyen’s philosophy: that allowing for the possibility of Nghệ’s authorship, rather than setting out to usurp Ut’s, has moral weight. Maybe authorship can never be definitively proven. Maybe all we’ll have is Ut’s version of events and Nghệ’s, buttressed by whatever proof can be gleaned by 3-D reconstructions of the past via satellite imaging. But if authorship remains inconclusive, we’ll always have “The Terror of War,” whose effects and influence linger on more than half a century after the click of a shutter.
The Stringer will be playing at the DC/DOX Film Festival on June 15.
Published on May 21, 2025
Words by Andy Crump
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers movies, beer, music, fatherhood, and way too many other subjects for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours: Paste Magazine, Inverse, The New York Times, Hop Culture, Polygon, and Men's Health, plus more. You can follow him on Bluesky and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65 percent craft beer.