The Stringer

A documentary that proposes that Nick Ut, photographer of “The Terror of War” (aka Napalm Girl), may not have actually taken the photo. Instead it seems like it was taken by a ‘stringer’ (a local freelancer, in journo speak)—Nguyễn Thành Nghệ.

There’s a half decent case to be made here—indeed we can see some discrepancies in the timeline, and as to who was where and when. There’s also an analysis that suggests the photo was taken on a Pentax instead of Ut’s Leica (using the corners of the frames as tell-tales).

However, the film suffers from Netflix-documentary-syndrome where its content is stretched thin, its production style is too showy and it is too brazen in trying to give us a hot-take. There’s a computer reconstruction of the events worth watching, but beyond that it struggles to fill its run time.

The Associated Press (who Ut worked for at the time)analysis is thorough but inconclusive¹. The filmmakers are happy to have a swipe at it but having just read it myself, it’s very well put together and probably of more value than this film is.

The fact that the AP can’t decide either way indicates they acknowledge the doubts over the photograph, that’s probably all that needs to be done from them. The content of the photo is so powerful and upsetting that to dwell on a debate over its authorship seems in poor taste. At the end of the day, it was taken by an AP journalist and made it to their news desk. Everyone agrees it was real, and everyone agrees on its impact.

If anything the real story left untouched is about the stringers—the freelancers who worked for these press agencies usually without credit. The film only really grazes on their lives during the war, and it seems a shame we don’t get to learn more about them.