Man who claims he took iconic ‘Napalm Girl’ photo speaks out in Netflix doc

The man who claims to have taken the iconic “Napalm Girl” photo that helped reshape the Vietnam War is speaking out in a new documentary as the Associated Press is standing by the photographer who has been credited for decades.

Netflix’s “The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo” focuses on the dispute as to who took the Pulitzer Prize-winning image seen around the world in 1972. The film alleges that AP photographer Nick Ut was wrongly given credit, and the filmmakers tracked down the actual man allegedly behind the camera: Nguyễn Thành Nghệ.

“Nick Ut came with me on that assignment. But he didn’t take that photo. He just took some pictures from afar. That photo was mine,” Nghệ says in the documentary released by Netflix last week.

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“The AP guy accepted the photo and gave me a print and the rest of the film. I gave the rest to a journalist in Saigon,” he continued, saying he got paid $20 and took friends out for drinks with the money.

The Vietnamese stringer said he “rarely” received credit for the photos he had taken during the war, “only on some special occasions.”

The origins of the documentary stem from Carl Robinson, the AP photo editor who worked in the Saigon bureau at the time the photo was taken. Robinson said he was directed by his supervisor at the time, revered photojournalist Horst Faas, to credit Ut instead of Nghệ and that he did so in fear of losing his job, a decision he said has haunted him for more than 50 years. Faas died in 2012 and Ut did not participate in the documentary.

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Gary Knight, a photojournalist and the executive producer of “The Stringer,” said that Ut is “in many ways a victim too.”

“I was never consulted, as far as we know,” Knight says in the film. “It was just given to him. So it’s a suicide pass, you know. Somebody threw him a hot rock.”

The Associated Press published its own extensive investigation into the origins of the photo earlier this year and concluded “it is possible” Ut took the photo but cannot definitively prove it “due to the passage of time, the death of many of the key players involved and the limitations of technology.” And while new findings raise unanswered questions and that the AP concedes it remains open to the possibility that Ut didn’t take the photo, there’s “no proof” Nghệ took the photo either.

“AP standards require that a photo credit be removed if definitive evidence shows the person claiming to have taken a photo did not. In the absence of such proof, the photo credit remains,” an Associated Press spokesperson said. 

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In a statement to Fox News Digital, Ut’s attorney, James Hornstein, said the Netflix documentary provides no new evidence — “no negative, no contact sheet, no print, no contemporaneous note, and no photographic archive” to dispute Ut took the photo, highlighting that only “a very narrow circle of individuals” are arguing that he didn’t.

“Aside from Carl Robinson and his wife, who put forward a 50-year delayed and uncorroborated account of events in the AP bureau, the only other proponents of the alternative thesis are Nguyễn Thanh Nghệ himself, and certain members of his family,” Hornstein said in the statement. “Not a single independent journalist present at Trảng Bàng supports this view. No AP staff members who worked in Saigon on the day of the attack support it. No documentary evidence — no negative, no print, no contemporaneous contact sheet — supports it. And no historian, archivist, or photographic expert with access to the AP archives has ever endorsed it.”

He continued, “The absence of broader support is striking, given the extensive coverage the photograph has received over the past half-century. If credible evidence existed to challenge Nick Út’s authorship, it would not have remained confined to a handful of individuals whose accounts emerge five decades after the fact and contradict the overwhelming body of contemporaneous testimony. The isolation of this thesis underscores the weight of the historical record — and further highlights the speculative nature of the narrative presented in the documentary.”

Netflix did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.