Photographer Nick Ut is best remembered for his iconic picture of the napalm girl but now is concerned about the propaganda that the media is used for the world over, says Saimi Sattar
During the Vietnam war, no one said Nicky you can’t take a picture. I clicked whatever picture I wanted to take but today it is different. We learnt so many lessons from the war. Now you go to Iraq or Syria and see that the media is controlled and used for propaganda. There is more embedded journalism now,” says Nick Ut, the Pulitzer prize winner who can be credited to have brought a war to an end with the iconic picture of the Napalm girl.
Recalling the day, Nicky as he is popularly called, says, “The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese had blocked Highway 1. On June 8, 1972, the next morning when South Vietnamese planes dropped napalm on dusty Trang Bang village, I saw thousands of refugees from everywhere and I took eight rolls of pictures of dead bodies — children, people and soldiers. I heard a bomb and there was smoke all around. After the smoke cleared, there was an elderly lady with a child and some families, all of them running. Then I saw her running with her arms stretched out and wearing no clothes. I wondered why, ran towards her and saw her burns. People were throwing water on her but that meant that she would scald the skin even more. I shot the picture while running towards her and thought she would die.” He wrapped the young girl in a raincoat and took her to the hospital in his company’s car along with other children. “I showed my media pass to get them treated,” he recalls.
Nick, who is in touch with Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the napalm girl who is now a grandmother based in Canada and a UN ambassador for peace, says that she often tells him, “Thanks to the picture, I am no longer running. I fly now. Everywhere.”
Incidentally Nick, who was just 16 at the time, had no idea about how big the picture was to become. “My colleagues told me ‘Nicky you have won a big award. I didn’t believe them, it was only after looking at the newspaper with the news of me winning a Pulitzer that I woke up to reality,” he says.
The photograph was awarded the World Press Photo of the Year in 1973, notably believed to have assisted the change in course of conflict towards liberation in April 1975. Over 45 years after it appeared on front pages and won every major photographic award, it continues to spark debate, indignation and emotion. But while The Terror of War has, along with Malcolm Browne’s Burning Monk and Eddie Adams’ Saigon Execution, taken on a life of its own and become a cultural short hand for war’s collateral damage, it is only one photo among thousands that he took.
Despite its newsworthiness, the picture did have its set of problems in being published. “Many newspapers didn’t use it, especially for the front page, because for normal people it is difficult to see the picture of a naked girl running,” he says. And the picture has also become a rallying point for some. When Facebook banned frontal nudity in the pictures that are posted on the social media, it was Nick’s picture that became the rallying cry for those who raised the banner on behalf of freedom of speech.
Photography, since the time Nick started out, has changed as has the photographer. He now covers Hollywood and has shot some iconic frames, including the one where Paris Hilton is in tears while being led to jail in a police car as well as Michael Jackson dancing on an SUV after being acquitted of child molestation. “Today every reporter has an iPhone and they take a series of videos, pictures and send it back right away. Back then we only had limited frames in film and taking the right picture meant a lot. Today our camera phones have become so advanced that it’s not challenging to seize the moment anymore,” he says.
With smartphone access and social media accounts, everyone is a photographer now. But Nick is not ashamed of sharing this space with commoners. “At least photography as a culture has gained a lot of popularity,” he told us.
Ask him for tips to become a good photographer and he replies, “You need to be patient in order to get a good picture. One has to adapt in order to click the right picture at the right time.”