It is an image engraved in all memories. You just have to say “the little girl with napalm” to see Kim Phuc appear before your eyes, this child burned alive, crying and running naked on the road after a South Vietnamese bombing on the village of Trang Bang in 1972.
But does this photo, a symbol of the horrors of the Vietnam War, hide a secret? If its authenticity is not in doubt, the documentary The Stringer (The Freelancer), screened on Saturday January 25 at the Sundance festival in the United States, detracts from the legend and cries scandal: the author of the image is not the Vietnamese photographer Nick Ut, but an independent photographer, a freelancer. , whose name was silenced for more than fifty years.
-This investigation is enough to shake the world of photojournalism, as photography is one of the icons of the press. It mobilized American opinion against the Vietnam War and launched the career of Nick Ut, a young Vietnamese with an exemplary career. After losing two brothers in the war, he was hired as a teenager at the Associated Press (AP) to support his family, and became internationally famous, winning numerous awards, including a Pulitzer. The victim, Kim Phuc, The World had met in 1997, has also become a symbol: still suffering from her injuries, she was used by the Vietnamese regime for propaganda purposes, before fleeing her country and becoming an ambassador for UNESCO. How could this famous photo, on which so many books, articles and testimonies have been published, have hidden a deception?
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