A week after World Press Photo suspended Nick Ut’s credit on the famous Napalm Girl photo, big names in photojournalism have come to Ut’s defense and attacked The Stringer and the people behind it for a perceived lack of transparency.
Nick Ut Invited to Visa pour l’Image
Jean-François Leroy, a former photojournalist and founder of Visa pour l’Image, a more than 35-year-old international photojournalism festival, invited Nick Ut to the annual International Festival of Photojournalism earlier this week.
“Because people are talking without having seen the [The Stringer]. Because Associated Press didn’t take away the credit. Because we don’t like the fact that this documentary was made after the disappearance of the main people involved, especially Horst Faas, to whom it would have been so easy to ask questions. Because we support him, we invite Nick to come to Perpignan,” Leroy wrote on Facebook this week. Perpignan, France, is where Visa pour l’Image takes place annually.
Former World Press Photo Jury Chairs Sharply Criticize World Press Photo
Leroy is far from the only prominent figure in photojournalism to come to Ut’s defense. Three former members of the World Press Photo Contest published an open letter on May 22 expressing their immense displeasure with World Press Photo’s decision to strip Nick Ut’s credit from Napalm Girl, also known as The Terror of War, despite the Associated Press’ refusal to do so following a year-long investigation, which most recently resulted in an expanded 97-page report on May 6.
The open letter is addressed to Joumana El Zein Khoury, Executive Director, World Press Photo; members of the World Press Photo Supervisory Board; and members of the World Press Photo International Advisory Committee. While published by James Colton, who was World Press Photo Chair in 2005 and a juror in 2003, the open letter is also signed by Dave Burnett (Word Press Photo Chair 2011 and World Press Photo Juror in 1999 and 2005) and Maria Mann (World Press Photo Juror in 2007 and 2008 and three-time World Press Photo Category Secretary). The letter is presented below with emphasis preserved:
As former Chairs and jurors of the World Press Photo Contest, we are saddened and deeply troubled by your decision to remove the attribution of Nick Ut as the photographer who took the 1973 World Press Photo of the Year known as The Terror of War.
As stated by Executive Director Joumana El Zein Khoury, the decision to do so was based on “doubt.” Specifically, you state, …“ Due to this current doubt, World Press Photo has suspended the attribution to Nick Út. This remains contested history, and it is possible that the author of the photograph will never be fully confirmed. The suspension of the authorship attribution stands unless it is proved otherwise.” So, World Press Photo’s position is: Guilty, until proven innocent!
This is a dangerous and flawed position to take and flies in the face of every standard used in the world that one is “Innocent until proven guilty.” No one, not you, Vii, or the film “The Stringer,” has met that burden of proof. Every conclusion made by the above has been an assumption. And your decision to remove Nick Ut’s attribution was based on doubt and assumption, and not on undisputed facts.
Use the same metric that you do with manipulated images. If you discover evidence that an image has been manipulated, it gets disqualified. But you don’t disqualify it because you “think” it may have been altered. You don’t base your actions on “doubt.”
We do not claim to know definitively who took that photo. But we do know that accusing someone without irrefutable evidence, and making a decision to strip the attribution is unwarranted, unreasonable and just plain wrong. It’s very simple. If there’s doubt, leave it be until it is proven otherwise — not suspend it until proven otherwise. This mentality will subject World Press Photo to scrutiny for every single photo ever awarded!
Therefore, we are asking that you, the supervisory board and advisory committee, reconsider your decision and reinstate the authorship that it has maintained for over 50 years… until proven otherwise.
If no decision is made to reinstate Ut’s authorship, we ask that you remove our names from your websites, archives, etc., as ever having participated as Chairs and jurors in your contests. We will suggest that other jurors, editors and photographers, who may feel you have done an injustice to Nick Ut, do the same, as well as suggest that all photographers refrain from entering any future WPP contests.
Because, if we base our actions on “doubts” rather than evidence, I seriously doubt anyone would want to have their name associated with an organization that doesn’t follow accepted journalistic practices and ethics.
Respectfully yours,
James Colton, Dave Burnett, and Maria Mann
Association Journalisme & Photographie Accuses ‘The Stringer’ of Manufacturing a Scandal
Alongside Visa pour l’Image and the support from the trio of people with World Press Photo experience, the Association Journalisme & Photographie (AJP) also recently published in support of Nick Ut. Michel Puech, the director of L’oeil de l’info, a photojournalism publication that is published by AJP, published an editorial on May 16 that skewers The Stringer, its creator, The VII Foundation, and World Press Photo in one fell swoop.
Puech immediately touches on an issue PetaPixel has dealt with since The Stringer premiered at Sundance in January: L’oiel de l’info has not been able to see the documentary. PetaPixel has repeatedly requested a screening of the film and has been denied.
Puech believes this is all part of a broader strategy.
“Everything is said to be done in this story to create a polemic by showing the film only in one festival in the United States. From this point of view, it is a success: the world press has echoed the so-called ‘scandal,’” Puech writes in his machine-translated editorial.
He argues that The VII Foundation is trying to boost the prestige of The Stringer to sell it for a high price to a studio.
Puech adds that he “fell out” out of his chair reading the World Press Photo’s statement on removing Ut’s credit.
“This decision actually confirms that the WPP has ceased to be the world’s largest photojournalism prize,” he continues.
“The WPP decision is a disgrace to the profession.”
Like Leroy, Puech dislikes that the accusations levied against Ut and the AP were made only after some key witnesses passed away.
“For more than 50 years, this image was unquestionably attributed to Nick Ut, and no one gave any doubt at one time when the witnesses were all still alive. The protest came only when the main witnesses, especially Horst Faas, the head of the AP office in Saigon were no longer in the world.
“The accusers… waited for all witnesses to have died to launch such a scandalous campaign…”
‘The WPP decision is a disgrace to the profession.’
‘Guilty Until Proven Innocent,’ Says Photographer David Kinnerly
Puech was far from the only photojournalist to react immediately following the World Press Photo’s decision last week.
David Kinnerly wrote a lengthy statement on the matter on Faceook, writing that World Press Photo treats Ut like he’s “guilty until proven innocent.”
“Guilty until proven innocent. That’s the way the World Press Photo Foundation (WPP) rolls. By arrogantly ‘suspending’ Nick Ut’s credit from his 1973, The Terror of War, also known as the Napalm Girl photograph, they are trying to exile Nick to photographic purgatory. The WPP can’t say for sure that he did or didn’t take it, but that’s not stopping them from playing Photo God by trying to destroy Nick’s good name with their twisted calculus. Even in football you need clear evidence to overrule a call on the field. That evidence isn’t there, particularly 50 years after the fact. And what right does the WPP have to ‘suspend’ or take away the credit of a photo submitted to them for an award that is owned and published world-wide by the Associated Press? Zero, it’s a circus and they are the clowns,” Kinnerly writes.
‘It’s a circus and [World Press Photo] are the clowns.’
Photographer Dave Burnett, Who Was With Nick Ut, Remains Firm on Who Took the Photo
Photographer Dave Burnett, who was with Ut in the field 53 years ago, wrote that Ut “made that picture” and that he refused to talk to the team behind The Stringer once he realized its purpose. Burnett also said World Press Photo contacted him in January, asking for more information about “the true authorship” of the famous photo. Burnett says WPP gave him just five days to respond.
“My response, was to question what kind of journalistic principles would lead them to feel that a decision about a situation that was 53 years on, had to be finalized in five days. I was aware of their supposed determination to create their own research and come up with an answer. Yet since January I have not heard a single word from WPP, and I have come to understand that they have not reached out to Nick Ut or his representatives either in that time. We two, Nick and I, are among the very few still living who were in the Press Corps that day in Trang Bang and while in the heat of the moment, no one spends conscious time monitoring what others do around them in a breaking news situation (no, we are, as photographers, trying to make pictures which tell that day’s story… ) my memory is very clear — as it remains on many indelible aspects of my time in Vietnam, on that day of many crucial things.”
Burnett adds, “Nick Ut made that picture. In my recollection, no one else was even remotely in a place to take that picture… There was never a moment when I doubted that Nick had made that picture…”
Burnett notes that he has not seen The Stringer, which he considers “very uncollegial since Gary [Knight] called me several years ago to talk about Trang Bang, and asked to see my pictures of that very day, early on in his narrative — before it became clear to me that he was attempting to show that another photographer had made the picture.”
‘Nick Ut made that picture.’
According to The Stringer, the other photographer is Vietnamese freelance photographer Nguyễn Thành Nghệ. World Press Photo, for its part, says it might also have been Vietnamese military photographer Huỳnh Công Phúc.
“I would like to see their analysis, but some things are very clear to me, and one of those is that in a desire to become part of the cabal which is embracing this film, World Press Photo is stumbling over its own journalistic shoes as it struggles to remain relevant and of interest in the wake of their own egregious ethical and intellectual lapses,” Burnett concludes.
Photographer Ed Ou Criticizes Glaring Contradictions and Lack of Transparency
Photographer Ed Ou’s statement on Facebook criticizes The VII Foundation, Gary Knight, and the filmmakers behind The Stringer as lacking transparency throughout their process.
“If this project is righting a historical wrong — if it is truly about truth, then why the embargoes, NDAs, selective screenings? Why are some people given advance copies to review and defend the film, but others are asked to withhold judgement? Why present something so consequential in such a limited and curated way, and insist that those who haven’t seen it stay silent, while someone’s legacy is being slowly dismantled and questioned?” Ou asks, noting that it is his understanding not even Nick Ut himself has been able to see The Stringer.
“The decision to go the film festival route, starting with Sundance, was clearly about prestige, and the pursuit (or hope) of profit. This wasn’t about care for Nick Ut. This wasn’t about creating space for a public reckoning, and certainly not about making the work accessible. You can’t claim to ‘dismantle colonial legacies’ while replicating their exact mechanics through an outdated film festival model that emphasizes exclusivity. If the goal was justice, as The Stringer‘s team claims, the process should have looked very different. And that is an active choice on VII and Gary Knight’s part…
“You cannot claim to be ‘decolonizing’ the field while using a deeply exclusive and commercial platform to do so. That contradiction is glaring. And it is precisely what is making me and so many of us uncomfortable.”
Ou, an Asian photojournalist, notes that it does matter that The Stringer‘s director, Bao Nguyen, is Vietnamese-American. However, it “doesn’t exempt the project from critique — especially when his identity is used to shield the film” from critique and questions.
‘You cannot claim to be ‘decolonizing’ the field while using a deeply exclusive and commercial platform to do so.’
Ou says the situation with Ut is personal. The statement below is edited for formatting but not content:
Nick Ut means something to us as Asian photojournalists and people of color. And I say ‘us’ with hesitation, knowing full well that it risks being read as tribal. I have spent my entire career trying not to be tokenized, not to be boxed in by my identity — trying instead to let my work speak for itself. But the truth is, we didn’t create that divide or distinction. I never defined myself or my work as an Asian photographer, but the industry did that to me whether I asked for it or not. The historically white majority structure of this field created those boxes and still sustains those very inequities.
Whether or not Nguyễn Thành Nghệ took the photo, the conversation unfolding now reminds us of how little space there ever was, and still is, for Asian and other BIPOC photojournalists. That even our few icons, the rare exceptions like Nick Ut, are not safe from having their legacy publicly dismantled without process or care, like in this case, and even more condescendingly, framed as a selfless pursuit of “truth” and “justice.”
To say this investigation isn’t a direct attack on Nick Ut’s character, that ‘they never set out to make him look bad or question his character’ is incredibly patronizing and disingenuous. To pretend it’s not personal while his name and legacy are being re-evaluated without his participation (or ability to defend himself) is to ignore the power dynamics at play and to infantilize the very real emotional weight this carries for many of us.
Even if Nghệ took the photo, it only underscores how there was and is room for just one Asian photographer to be granted authorship and acclaim in a war largely told by white eyes. That isn’t empowering. It’s devastating. It’s the same colonial logic that defined the war itself — a US led campaign justified in the name of ‘freedom’, but structured to erase local voices, even in how the story was told. That dynamic hasn’t changed nearly as much as we would like to think. I see it now in how this documentary has been rolled out. I see it in the discourse surrounding it. I see this still in the industry, no matter how much we want to think things have gotten better.
I am not saying the questions of who took this photo shouldn’t be posed, and if Nghệ did indeed take the photo, that is a separate discussion to the point I am trying to make.
But at this current moment, I need to highlight how the attitude towards Nick Ut, VII’s entire approach IS its form of exclusion, erasure, and bias — insidiously hiding behind a professional tone.
When white professionals preface their reflections with ‘we need to reckon with colonialism’ and then proceed to discredit BIPOC peers raising questions, or go after Nick Ut, firmly throwing his credibility into question, without giving him the tools to even defend himself… That’s not accountability. That’s rhetorical insulation.
I haven’t seen the film. I haven’t been able to. I hope the points I raised here won’t be dismissed with ‘just wait until you’ve seen it,’ because what I’m pointing to is a much broader structural issue, one that exists regardless of what is in the documentary and the ultimate truth of who pressed the shutter.
This isn’t about protecting Nick Ut from critique. It’s about asking whether this version of critique actually makes space for the ‘justice’ supporters of this film are claiming, or just reinforces the same old structures in a new vocabulary.
And that question, not just the photo’s authorship is what we should also be asking right now.
‘The Stringer’ Director Bao Nguyen Calls World Press Photo’s Decision ‘Extraordinary’
The Stringer director Bao Nguyen describes the World Press Photo decision as “extraordinary.”
“Their findings conclude that, based on the available visual and technical evidence, Nguyễn Thành Nghệ, a long-overlooked Vietnamese stringer, appears more likely than Nick Út to have taken the photo,” Nguyen writes.
“This renewed examination was prompted, in part, by the evidence presented in The Stringer, an investigative documentary I directed in close collaboration with a team of journalists and film crew, many of whom are Vietnamese. This recognition is deeply meaningful to all of us involved. But above all, it represents a critical first step in acknowledging the man we believe is the rightful photographer: Nguyễn Thành Nghệ. We hope the world will come to know and say his name.”
Nguyen claims the movie is not about Nick Ut, but is instead a “story about truth, memory, and the quiet burden of a man who carried a secret for over fifty years.”
The director maintains that his film stands on a foundation of truth that is supported by testimony, documentation, and because of World Press Photo, “the findings of an independent third-party review.”
He adds that World Press Photo’s decision to strip Ut’s credit “signals a turning point.”
“It affirms the need to look again at the stories we thought we knew. And it marks a step toward giving Nguyễn Thành Nghệ the recognition he has long deserved.”
A Rift Across the Photography World
The Associated Press maintains that there is not sufficient evidence to strip Nick Ut’s authorship from Napalm Girl following extensive investigations.
In contrast, World Press Photo claims there is too much “doubt” to keep Ut’s authorship. World Press Photo has stopped short of transferring the credit to anyone else.
“When reduced to its core, what is striking is the convergence across all three investigations—by World Press Photo, AP, and the filmmakers—that there remains doubt about the photo’s authorship. While the image has traditionally been credited to Nick Út, the available evidence points to a strong possibility that Nguyễn Thành Nghệ took it instead, but also raises the possibility that Huỳnh Công Phúc may have been in a better position to take the photo,” Joumana El Zein Khoury writes. “The key difference lies not in the recognition of doubt, but in how each organization has chosen to act in response.”
World Press Photo says, following its judging procedures, it must strip authorship given what it describes as significant doubt over who took the famous photo.
Nick Ut also won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for the image. The organization “does not anticipate further action” concerning Ut’s award. This decision is partly due to AP’s review, as Pulitzer Prizes rely upon the submitting news organizations when determining authorship.
While AP cannot conclusively prove that Nick Ut took The Terror of War and that its extensive investigation has raised vital questions that may prove impossible to answer, there is insufficient evidence to believe that its original authorship decision in 1972 was wrong.
No matter who took the photo, the situation surrounding Nick Ut and The Terror of War has exposed a significant rift in photojournalism, and the situation has touched many more people than just Nick Ut.
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