The photo “The little girl with napalm” in the heart of a controversy

Sunday 26th January 2025 01:34 AM

The legendary photography of Kim Phuc, 9, at the center, who flees with other children after an air attack in napalm on alleged hiding places of Vietcong, near Trang Bang, Vietnam on June 8, 1972. On this non -reframed version , we see photographer David Burnett on the right, interviewed in “The Strunger”. Presented at the Sundance Festival, this documentary says that Nick UT is not the author of the famous photo. NICK UT / ASSOCIATED PRESS

It is an image engraved in all memories. Just say “The little girl with napalm” to see Kim Phuc 'eyes appear before her lives, this vivid burned child, in tears and bare current on the road after a South Vietnamese bombardment on the village of Trang Bang, in 1972.

But this photo, symbol of the horrors of the Vietnam War, hide a secret? If its authenticity is no doubt, the documentary The Stringer (The freelancer), projected Saturday January 25 at the Sundance Festival, in the United States, enclosed the legend and shouts in scandal: the author of the image would not be the Vietnamese photographer Nick Ut, but an independent photographer, a freelance , whose name was you for more than fifty years.

This survey has something to shake the world of photojournalism, as the photo has among the icons of the press. She mobilized American opinion against the Vietnam War and launched the career of Nick Ut, a young Vietnamese with the exemplary journey. After losing two brothers in the war, he was still hired as a teenager at Associated Press (AP) to feed his family, and became world famous winning many prizes, including a pulitzer. The victim, Kim Phuc, that The world had met in 1997, also became 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, testimonies have been published, could she hide a deception?

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