Whose Eye Was It? The Fight Over Napalm Girl's Credit
Fifty years after Trang Bang, three investigations studied the same road and the same negative and reached three verdicts. So what is a photo credit, really?
FactUnion VerifiedEvery fact on the episode's fact sheet was checked against its sources. Wrong facts were corrected. What this meansFacts checked 19 Oct 2026
Chapters (11)
About this episode
For more than fifty years, 'The Terror of War', the photograph of nine-year-old Kim Phuc running from a napalm strike on 8 June 1972, has carried Nick Ut's name. Then the documentary 'The Stringer' said a local stringer, Nguyen Thanh Nghe, took it. World Press Photo suspended Ut's credit. AP kept it. A 3D reconstruction, an analysis of the negative and a pile of conflicting witness accounts each pointed somewhere different. In March 2026 Ut took the film's makers to a defamation court in France.
Wren and Theo go back to the Saigon bureau, where stringers were paid per picture and nobody wrote down their names, and ask what a credit line ever recorded. It turns out each institution in this fight is answering a different question. Note: our sources do not report what happened at or after the 15 May 2026 hearing in Tarascon, and this episode describes no ruling.
Hosted by Wren and Theo, performed by synthetic voices. Supported by ShotBreak.
Facts and sources
Every fact used in this episode, with the sources it was checked against. Download as data
204 of 204 recorded lines matched the checked script.
‘The Terror of War’ was taken on 8 June 1972, credited to AP Saigon staffer ‘Nick’ Huynh Cong Ut, and shows children, including 9-year-old Kim Phuc, fleeing a ‘friendly fire’ napalm attack by a South Vietnamese aircraft.
The documentary ‘The Stringer’, directed by Bao Nguyen and produced by the VII Foundation, has been on Netflix since 28 November 2025 and claims the photo was taken by Nguyen Thanh Nghe, a local stringer who reportedly sold his film to AP’s Saigon bureau for 20 dollars.
At the film’s Sundance premiere, Nghe said: “I took the photo.”
Nghe says he was driving for an NBC crew that day, and his daughter Jannie Nguyen says his wife tore up the print he had been given.
Nghe’s brother-in-law Tran Van Than corroborated that he went to the AP office with Nghe that day, and Nghe recalls selling the photograph to the AP for $20 and a print.
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Robinson told Time: “I’m going to be 80 years old. Something I really want to do before I pass away is find the real photographer and just say sorry.”
Burnett, who admits he did not actually see Ut take the photo, says he saw Ut sprint toward the children and that Faas told Ut, “You do good work today, Nick Ut.”
According to AP’s January 2025 reporting, Burnett said he witnessed Ut and Alexander Shimkin, a freelance photographer working primarily for Newsweek, taking photos as Kim Phuc and other children emerged from the smoke.
When AP approached Robinson during its January 2025 probe, he said he had signed an NDA with Knight and the VII Foundation, and Knight said Robinson would only speak off the record.
AP’s January 2025 report concluded: “In the absence of new, convincing evidence to the contrary, the AP has no reason to believe anyone other than Ut took the photo.”
AP says Faas, who died in 2012, “would frequently discuss the image publicly and in writings and never doubted that it was Ut’s.”
In April 2026 Michael Ebert, who oversees Faas’s estate, said Faas and Robinson “did not always have the best relationship” and that “Horst was too upright and too intelligent for that.”
AP’s May 2025 report says that of 10 people on the scene that day whom AP reached, Nghe is the only one who believes Ut didn’t take the picture.
AP concluded after a nearly year-long investigation that it lacked “the definitive evidence required by AP’s standards to change the credit” of the photograph.
AP’s 6 May 2025 report found: “It is unlikely the famous photo was taken by a Leica M2” and “It is likely the famous photo was taken using a Pentax camera.”
In early 2024 the film’s team asked INDEX for an analysis, and INDEX built a 3D model from “dozens of pictures taken that day by the various photographers present at the scene, as well as film footage and historical satellite imagery of the site”, concluding it is “highly unlikely” Ut took the photo.
World Press Photo suspended the attribution of ‘The Terror of War’ to Nick Ut on 16 May 2025 without reassigning authorship, and the 1973 World Press Photo of the Year award stands.
World Press Photo executive director Joumana El Zein Khoury wrote: “We conclude that the level of doubt is too significant to maintain the existing attribution. At the same time, lacking conclusive evidence pointing definitively to another photographer, we cannot reassign authorship either.”
World Press Photo says Nguyễn Thành Nghệ or Huỳnh Công Phúc, a Vietnamese military photographer who sometimes sold images to news agencies, may have been in a better position to take the photograph, based on location, distance and the likely camera used.
On 26 June 2025 Khoury admitted World Press Photo “should have published the full report rather than only the executive summary” and released the full report.
In France, Ut’s lawyers filed a public defamation action under the Press Law of 1881 against Gary Knight of the VII Foundation and Netflix France.
The French filing alleges the film defames Ut by saying he is not the author and that he misrepresented his role in getting Kim Phuc to medical care, and his lawyers say it portrays him as a “shameless liar.”
The filing quotes Knight’s opening line in the film: “When you’re photographing with film, there’s always some mystery. But what you do know is what you didn’t take.”
Phototrend reported that the complaint identifies fifteen defamatory sequences, that a hearing was set for 15 May 2026 before the tribunal de Tarascon (Bouches-du-Rhône), that Ut’s lawyer is James Hornstein, and that Ut says any award would go to charity.
Ut explained his choice of France by saying: “It feels only natural to seek justice there…”
Ut told AP the controversy “has been very difficult for me and has caused great pain.”
Kim Phuc did not take part in the film, and through a representative she called it an “outrageous and false attack” on Ut.
Malcolm Browne’s Saigon AP bureau handbook says the bureau kept no stringers on regular retainer and paid “$5 U.S. or its equivalent in Vietnamese piastres per picture, on acceptance”; the negative normally became AP property and went to Tokyo, and the Tokyo photo desk decided which photos were accepted.
The handbook says a stringer on a day assignment got “a flat $10 U.S. (or its piastre equivalent) for whatever he produces for the day,” and that “In rare instances, higher rates can be paid for pictures of exceptional interest.”
Peter Arnett, writing in March 1972, said Browne wrote the guide in 1962 and “What Mal wrote in 1962 applied up to the day I left late last year.”
AP says Faas, its Saigon photo chief for a decade from 1962, recruited and trained foreign and Vietnamese freelancers, known as “Horst’s army”, who went out with cameras and film he supplied, and he and his editors picked the best of their pictures.
Vanity Fair reports that in the film, Nghe’s brother-in-law says he returned 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.
In Ut’s French court submissions, AP office secretary Tu Pease (Miss Tu) says she was the only person at AP who paid local stringers, that she recorded every payment and sent the records to New York, and that Faas would never have paid so little for such a photo.
Tim Page wrote: “Horst Faas bought my first freelance pictures.”
Amateur Photographer quotes the AP report: “It was also likely, though not certain, the image was taken with a Pentax, though some Nikon cameras had similar characteristics to some Pentax cameras of the same era.”
The AP report asks: “If the camera used was a Pentax, could Nick Ut have taken the photo?” and notes Ut “has said in multiple interviews that he carried two Leica and two Nikon cameras.”
Amateur Photographer reports that Ut also used a Pentax that belonged to his brother, an AP photographer killed on assignment in Vietnam.
The Science Museum in London exhibits Ut’s Leica M2 camera, manufactured in 1965, and its 35mm Summicron lens.
In a 2015 interview, Ut said he carried two Nikons and two Leicas, began photographing the fleeing people with a Nikon and 300mm lens, then switched to a Leica M2 with a 35mm f2 lens as they came closer.
Removed during checking (2)
Robinson says in The Stringer: "Horst Faas, who had been standing next to me, said, 'Nick Ut, make it Nick Ut. Make it staff.' Those were his words exactly."
AP's May 2025 position was that "to overrule a photo credit given at the time would require clear evidence the decision made by those at the scene was incorrect. Such certainty is simply not possible to have here."
