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The person who claims to have taken the enduring “Napalm Lady” picture that helped reshape the Vietnam Struggle is talking out in a brand new documentary because the Associated Press is standing by the photographer who has been credited for many years.
Netflix‘s “The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Picture” focuses on the dispute as to who took the Pulitzer Prize-winning picture seen around the globe in 1972. The movie alleges that AP photographer Nick Ut was wrongly given credit score, and the filmmakers tracked down the precise man allegedly behind the digital camera: Nguyễn Thành Nghệ.
“Nick Ut got here with me on that task. However he did not take that picture. He simply took some photos from afar. That picture was mine,” Nghệ says within the documentary launched by Netflix final week.
Netflix’s new documentary “The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Picture” argues Nguyễn Thành Nghệ took the enduring “Napalm Lady” picture through the Vietnam Struggle. (Courtesy of Netflix © 2025)
“The AP man accepted the picture and gave me a print and the remainder of the movie. I gave the remainder to a journalist in Saigon,” he continued, saying he acquired paid $20 and took buddies out for drinks with the cash.
The Vietnamese stringer stated he “not often” acquired credit score for the pictures he had taken through the conflict, “solely on some particular events.”
The origins of the documentary stem from Carl Robinson, the AP picture editor who labored within the Saigon bureau on the time the picture was taken. Robinson stated he was directed by his supervisor on the time, revered photojournalist Horst Faas, to credit score Ut as an alternative of Nghệ and that he did so in concern of dropping his job, a choice he stated has haunted him for greater than 50 years. Faas died in 2012 and Ut didn’t take part within the documentary.
Gary Knight, a photojournalist and the manager producer of “The Stringer,” stated that Ut is “in some ways a sufferer too.”
“I used to be by no means consulted, so far as we all know,” Knight says within the movie. “It was simply given to him. So it is a suicide cross, you understand. Any individual threw him a scorching rock.”
Retired Related Press photographer Nick Ut has been celebrated for the enduring “Napalm Lady” picture from the Vietnam Struggle. (Alberto Pizzoli/AFP through Getty Pictures)
The Related Press revealed its own extensive investigation into the origins of the picture earlier this yr and concluded “it’s potential” Ut took the picture however can not definitively show it “as a result of passage of time, the loss of life of lots of the key gamers concerned and the restrictions of expertise.” And whereas new findings elevate unanswered questions and that the AP concedes it stays open to the likelihood that Ut did not take the picture, there’s “no proof” Nghệ took the picture both.
“AP requirements require {that a} picture credit score be eliminated if definitive proof exhibits the individual claiming to have taken a photograph didn’t. Within the absence of such proof, the picture credit score stays,” an Related Press spokesperson stated.
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AP picture editor Carl Robinson recollects how the “Napalm Lady” picture was within the Netflix documentary “The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Picture.” (Courtesy of Netflix © 2025)
In a press release to Fox Information Digital, Ut’s lawyer, James Hornstein, stated the Netflix documentary gives no new proof — “no unfavourable, no contact sheet, no print, no contemporaneous be aware, and no photographic archive” to dispute Ut took the picture, highlighting that solely “a really slim circle of people” are arguing that he did not.
“Other than Carl Robinson and his spouse, who put ahead a 50-year delayed and uncorroborated account of occasions within the AP bureau, the one different proponents of the choice thesis are Nguyễn Thanh Nghệ himself, and sure members of his household,” Hornstein stated within the assertion. “Not a single impartial journalist current at Trảng Bàng helps this view. No AP employees members who labored in Saigon on the day of the assault help it. No documentary proof — no unfavourable, no print, no contemporaneous contact sheet — helps it. And no historian, archivist, or photographic professional with entry to the AP archives has ever endorsed it.”
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He continued, “The absence of broader help is putting, given the in depth protection the {photograph} has acquired over the previous half-century. If credible proof existed to problem Nick Út’s authorship, it might not have remained confined to a handful of people whose accounts emerge 5 a long time after the actual fact and contradict the overwhelming physique of contemporaneous testimony. The isolation of this thesis underscores the load of the historic document — and additional highlights the speculative nature of the narrative introduced within the documentary.”
Netflix didn’t instantly reply to Fox Information Digital’s request for remark.
