Who Took the Photo Known as ‘Napalm Girl’?

Conspiracies and cover-ups are a dime a dozen in fictional movies (thrillers, political dramas, you name it). But when a documentary unravels a conspiracy, it can take on the kind of hushed suspense those films used to have and rarely do anymore. (The heyday of conspiracy cinema, the ’70s era of “All the President’s Men” and “Chinatown” and “The Conversation” and “The Parallax View,” was about 10,000 conspiracy movies ago.)

“The Stringer” is a documentary mystery about a deadly serious subject: the true authorship of the famous Vietnam War photograph, taken on June 8, 1972, in the town of Trảng Bàng, that showed the aftermath of a napalm attack — a 9-year-old girl named Phan Thį Kim Phúc running, naked, toward the camera, her arms outstretched like broken wings, her mouth open in a scream of agony. She’d been burned all over her body (the shot shows four other children, clothed and running with her), and the photograph, from the moment it went out into the world and was viewed by billions, became known as “Napalm Girl.” It is one of the most iconic and devastating images of the horror of war ever seen.

“Naplam Girl” is recognized to be a photograph of immeasurable historic importance, one that had a profound influence on people’s feelings about the Vietnam War. (It’s commonly said that the photo helped end the war; I would say that’s something of an overstatement.) But who took the photograph? The morning after it was shot, when it was sent out from the Saigon office of the Associated Press, it was credited to Nick Út, a 21-year-old Vietnamese photographer who was the AP’s local staff photographer. Almost overnight, the photograph changed his life. From that moment on, he became celebrated for having taken one of the most iconic images of the 20th century.

But “The Stringer,” directed by Bao Nguyen (“The Greatest Night in Pop”) and executive produced by Gary Knight, who spearheaded the two-year investigative journey the film is about (Knight, tall and courtly and British, with a wedge of white hair, serves as its on-camera guide and interviewer), claims that Nick Út was not the one who took the photo. Út was there that day, on that desolate strip of road in Trảng Bàng, along with other film cameramen and photographers. But the documentary asserts that the photograph was taken by Nguyen Thanh Nghe, a freelance photographer who contributed photos to the AP. He was there that day too.

The film’s claim of what happened is relatively simple. It says that Horst Faas, the AP photo editor in Saigon, knew that Nghe had taken the photo, but after paying him the standard $20 for it Faas ordered the shot to be credited to Nick Út, because he wanted it to be an AP staff photo. According to the film, this sort of thing happened all the time and was not considered a big deal; it was part a system of “benign” exploitation. But with a photograph of this power and magnitude, the re-crediting (if that’s what happened) proved to be momentous.

It’s my job to say whether I think a movie is good or not, and let me say right now that “The Stringer” is a very good movie: rapt, urgent, absorbing. But in this case it isn’t that simple. The entire film spins around a binary question: Did Nick Út take that photo? Or did Nguyen Thanh Nghe? And it’s impossible to evaluate the film in any meaningful way without judging its central thesis, which is essentially a conspiracy theory: that credit for the photo was stolen, and that this has all been covered up for 50 years. If that’s what happened, it would be a scandal, a tragedy, maybe a crime.

Gary Knight, a photographer himself, leads the investigation, but the film’s pivotal figure is Carl Robinson, who at the time was an AP photo editor. Robinson, now in his eighties, says that he was the one who swapped in one photographer’s name for another after his boss, Horst Faas, ordered him to do so. And he claims that he sat on this secret, with a silent squirmy guilt, for 50 years.

Why didn’t he say anything before? It would have meant rocking the boat to the tenth power; tossing a grenade into the middle of a sensitive cultural legacy; disrupting the lives of all those who had lied about it; and beyond that, he would have had to go up against the AP, a news organization that is fiercely protective of its own legacy. The AP conducted its own six-month investigation into this case, which involved interviewing seven witnesses, and the conclusion it came to is that there was no conspiracy, no swapped photo credit — that Nick Út was, in fact, the photographer. The AP has has raised major objections to “The Stringer,” and Nick Út has threatened to take legal action against the filmmakers.      

For a while, I watched “The Stringer” with my guard up, skeptical of its claim. In part that’s because the film, rather than taking the attitude of “Oh, let’s investigate this question,” operates right out of the box from the point-of-view that the photo credit was stolen. The film gathers evidence as it goes along, but it already seems to have made up its mind. And that put me on alert. At the same time, I listened to Carl Robinson tell his story (about being ordered to falsify the photo credit), and not only does the story come off as convincing, but a question lingers in back of it: What would his motivation be to lie about this? The story he’s telling makes him look bad. Fox Butterworth, the fabled New York Times reporter (who thinks the film’s thesis is untrue), has said that he thinks Robinson is lying out of an animus toward his old employer, the AP, which he parted ways with in 1978. But that seems like quite a stretch. You fabricate this story now, 47 years later, all to take revenge on the organization you worked for decades ago?   

Nick Út refused to be interviewed by the filmmakers (which might be a sign of something), and much of “The Stringer” is devoted to their attempt to unearth the identity of the “other” photographer. At the start of the film, they don’t know who he is, or even if he’s dead or alive. “The Stringer” becomes a detective story. Carl Robinson’s wife, who is Vietnamese, claims that 50 years ago it was an open secret among Vietnamese photographers that the photo credit on “Naplam Girl” was stolen. And when Nguyen Thanh Nghe’s name finally bubbles to the surface, we start to feel some of the catharsis triggered by a suspense drama. The filmmakers track Nghe down in California, where he has lived for decades, and they fill in his biography. Finally, Gary Knight sits down with him, and we hear his version of the events.

Nghe’s memories offer no conclusive proof. Yet as viewers, we take him in — a man of gentle force in his early 90s, with an air of radiant sincerity, his faculties very much intact, insisting with calm conviction that yes, he was the one who took the photograph, and yes, it was taken away from him. Once again, we ask ourselves: If this is not the truth, then why would this old man be lying? He evinces no desire for controversy or glory. Why would his version of the events line up so exactly with Carl Robinson’s? There’s one detail in Nghe’s story that’s haunting: He says that Horst Faas, on that fateful day, gave him a copy of the photo he’d taken, which Nghe then took home, and his wife was so upset by it that she destroyed it. Later on, it might have served as the proof of his authorship.      

“The Stringer,” like any conspiracy thriller, makes us want to believe. That’s part of the nature of a movie like this one. Yet I’m too much of a cynical skeptic to take that kind of dramatic impulse as anything definitive. Watching a documentary like this one, what we want, ultimately, isn’t emotion, or even an all-too-plausible argument. What we want is proof. We want it as citizens watching a film about a daunting photographic artifact. And in a strange way we want it as moviegoers, who have been conditioned by half a century of conspiracy cinema to expect a scenario that culminates in a smoking gun.

Guess what? I’d say that “The Stringer” comes close to having one. Halfway through the movie, we see all the key photographs that were taken in those horrible minutes along the road in Trảng Bàng, just after the village area behind it had been bombed (mistakenly) by South Vietnamese Air Raiders. (That’s right, the attack that “Napalm Girl” is a record of was a “friendly fire” incident, and U.S. forces were not involved.) The 8 x 10 photos are assembled on a table, and for moment you may think back to the sequence in Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out” where the sound man played by John Travolta assembles a bunch of still photographs into a crude 20-second-long piece of moving footage just like the Zapruder film. (Apropos of nothing, I’ve always found that scene to be the moment I check out of “Blow Out” — a movie I dislike intensely. Because how is it remotely plausible that a mainstream magazine, publishing stills from a Zapruder-type film, would publish enough stills that you could actually make a short film out of them?)

As it turns out, though, the photos-on-the-table sequence in “The Stringer” is merely the appetizer. The filmmakers hand all that material over to a group of forensic experts in Paris, who do a meticulous computer-based analysis, incorporating satellite images, of which figures stood precisely where and when during those crucial few minutes in Trảng Bàng. At the film’s climax, they present their analysis, and it really is like combing through the Zapruder film, looking for that crucial visual detail that will suddenly bring the hidden reality into focus.

We’re seeing shots of what happened — Kim Phúc running down that road (which we also see in filmed color footage). We’re seeing shots of the photographers who were there. And we’re seeing the photographs that they took. All of it has to track in a spatial-temporal way.

What the analysis ultimately reveals is a figure, standing far away, probably 60 feet down the road from Kim Phúc — in other words, too far away to have taken the “Napalm Girl” photo. The forensic team claims that that figure is Nick Út. Then we’re shown several photos that that figure was in the exact position to have taken. And here’s the kicker: Those photos were AP photos, credited to Nick Út. He took them. Which suggests that when it comes to “Napalm Girl,” he couldn’t have been in the right place at the right time. “The Stringer” is a potent human story of daunting cultural resonance. But like all conspiracy scenarios, what it exerts is the cleansing fascination of reality laid bare. It deserves to be seen — for the important truths that are there in it, and for the sheer addictive pull of it.