“The Stringer,” a story about the journey to pursue the truth and correct the record of attribution for one of the most well-known photographs of the Vietnam War, screened yesterday on Thursday, July 31, at the Film Center as part of Martha’s Vineyard Documentary Week.
The investigative documentary, which premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, makes the claim that the photograph “The Terror of War,” also known as “Napalm Girl,” was taken in 1972 by a Vietnamese stringer — a freelance photographer named Nguyen Thanh Nghe, and not by Nick Ut, an AP staff photographer, who won a Pulitzer and the World Press Photo award for the photo.
Followed by a live panel discussion with director Bao Nguyen, photojournalist Gary Knight, and producer Fiona Turner, moderated by journalist and publisher of The Martha’s Vineyard Times, Charles Sennott, the event was well-attended. Tickets sold out yesterday, and many stood along the staircases of the theater to watch.
Director Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American filmmaker whose work includes a documentaries on the “We Are the World” song and the history of “Saturday Night Live,” described a deep personal connection to this film because his own parents, who were around the same age as the subject of the controversial photograph Kim Phuc and also lived near the 17th parallel, were refugees of the war. When they came to the U.S., they felt that their story and the story of the war were told for them, he said. They, like stringer Nghe, felt they couldn’t tell their story.
“Whose story, whose memory has more value than another person?,” Nguyen asked.
The film was a risk for Nguyen, who’s always looked up to Ut in the Vietnamese-American creative community, and even wondered whether who took the photograph was important when the impact of the photograph was incredibly strong, including galvanizing the anti-war movement, regardless of authorship. He realized, however, the importance and his privilege to provide a platform for Vietnamese who’ve previously been denied their memory and experience.
For so long, people like Kim Phuc and his parents, he said, were asked purely to endure and survive, rather than have the ability to bear witness, he said.
“I think the power to witness, it shouldn’t be seen as a privilege,” he said. “It should be seen as a right, a human right.”
Knight, founder of the photojournalist training VII Foundation, first heard about the allegation that the Vietnamese stringer, Nguyen Thanh Nghe, rather than Ut took the famous photo in 2010. It wasn’t until Christmas of 2022, however, that Carl Robinson, who was AP photo editor in Saigon when the photo was taken, wrote to Knight. Robinson, who was dismissed by the AP in 1978, is a key source in the film and said he was overruled by Horst Faas, AP’s Saigon chief of photo, in the use of the controversial photo and instructed to make it staff and credit Ut.
That a stringer took the photograph over Ut was an extraordinary allegation, and when he became aware of the controversy, Knight turned to his wife, broadcast journalist and filmmaker Fiona Turner, who felt the story needed to be captured visually.
“I could see that if these allegations were true, then this was a story that was larger than one man’s story,” she said in the panel discussion. “It was a story that reflected a culture of the time, and how that impacted the Vietnamese journalists of the time, who were largely overlooked, and it was the American media, the Western-run media, who helped sway and determine how these narratives were told.”
Like the director Nguyen, Knight also felt a personal connection in making the film through an affinity and gratitude to local stringers he’s worked with across the world. Being a stringer is a “fragile existence,” he said. Stringers don’t have the benefit of bulletproof jackets, helmets, and insurance, and they can’t get on a plane and go home to a safe place. “They often weren’t credited, as you see here,” he said. “This is not an isolated incident.”
And even with digital technology, Knight said, this still happens. The work of Palestinian photographers in Gaza is questioned constantly, he said. It happens everywhere stringers work. “They can be arrested. They can be incarcerated. Nobody is going to come and rescue them and take them out,” he said.
Knight knew AP’s Saigon chief of photos Faas well and worked with him in Vietnam in 2005 training Vietnamese journalists. “Like all of us, he’s capable of doing great things, generous things, good things and making mistakes, so I hope that this film doesn’t serve as a condemnation of Horst and everything that he did because he doesn’t deserve that,” Knight said Thursday after the screening. Horst passed away in 2012.
This film was a practice of listening that allows viewers to make their own decisions, Nguyen said. “History belongs to everyone, but I think it’s sometimes the people that we decide to listen to.”The issue remains controversial. The Associated Press, who conducted their own investigation, said they found no evidence that Ut didn’t take the photograph. In June, NPR reported that Ut’s attorney Jim Hornstein planned to file a defamation lawsuit. World Press Photo suspended authorship attribution of the photo, which won the nonprofit’s award in 1972, to Ut pending further evidence.