Netflix releases the documentary “The Stringer: The Man Who Took The Photo,” the story of the invisible man behind the world’s most visible photo

Some images need no introduction. They are seared into our collective retina and define entire eras. A naked, terrified girl runs with her arms spread wide down a hot asphalt road while the black smoke of napalm devours the sky behind her.

That photograph did not just help end a war; it defined our understanding of pain, innocence, and photojournalism. For half a century, the history behind that image has been monolithic and untouchable. We were told that a young, brave Associated Press (AP) photographer, Nick Ut, was there, snapped the shot, and then saved the girl.

It is a perfect story of heroism and timing. But what if that story was actually a corporate construction? What if the eye that truly witnessed that horror belonged to someone whose name was erased by a handful of dollars and Western bureaucracy? The documentary “The Stringer: The Man Who Took The Photo” has arrived to dismantle the myth. It is not just a film; it is a forensic autopsy of historical memory. And what it finds among the bones of the past is uncomfortable, painful, and deeply human.

The email that changed everything

Great revelations rarely begin with fireworks; they usually start with a whisper. In this case, it was an email. The sender was Carl Robinson, a veteran photo editor who worked in the Saigon bureau during the hardest years of the conflict. The subject line foreshadowed the storm: “Part 2: Who really shot the ‘Napalm Girl’ photo? A 50-year cover-up.”

Carrying the weight of an uneasy conscience for decades, Robinson decided to confess a secret to Gary Knight, a renowned conflict photographer. His account was simple and devastating: the photo was not taken by Nick Ut.

According to Robinson, the order came from the top, from legendary editor Horst Faas. The image had to be attributed to Ut. Why? Because Ut was on staff. He was “one of them,” the brother of another fallen photographer. The agency needed a hero of its own, not an outside collaborator—not a “stringer.”

The ghosts of war

To understand the drama, one must understand what a stringer is. In the ecosystem of war journalism, they are the plankton that feed the whales. They are local photographers, drivers, and hustlers who risk their skins without health insurance, without a fixed salary, and often, without credit.

The documentary’s investigation takes us to California, to a modest house where an elderly man named Nguyen Thanh Nghe lives. Nghe is not famous. He has not given speeches before the Pope nor received a Pulitzer. But he asserts, with astonishing calm, that he was there. That he took the photo.

His account is heartbreaking in its bureaucratic banality. He says that on that day, after the bombing, he returned to the city and handed his roll of film to the agency’s office. A Western editor reviewed the images, selected one, kept the negative, and paid him for his work. The price for making history only to be erased from it: twenty dollars and two rolls of unexposed film.

“I worked hard for it, but that guy took it all,” Nghe says to the camera, not with rage, but with the resignation of someone who has lived his whole life knowing a truth that no one else believed.

CSI: Vietnam

What makes this documentary fascinating is that it does not rely solely on one man’s word against another’s. It evolves into a technological thriller. The filmmakers hired INDEX, a group of forensic experts based in Paris, to digitally reconstruct that day. Gary Knight describes the process as if the film Blow-Up met CSI.

Using all available photos and archival footage, they created a 3D model of the road, the soldiers, the children, and the photographers. They calculated shadows, lines of sight, and angles. The result of the forensic analysis is a hammer blow to the official history.

The model places Nick Ut in a position from which, according to the calculations, he could not have taken that specific image. The angle, the perspective—everything aligns with Nghe’s position. Furthermore, there is the matter of the camera. The original negative shows technical characteristics specific to a Pentax camera. Nghe used a Pentax. The agency argues that Ut also had one, but the coincidence of position and equipment tips the scales of doubt alarmingly.

The institutional earthquake

The repercussions of these revelations have been seismic. The Associated Press, the jealous guardian of its legacy, has closed ranks, defending its version and Ut’s authorship after conducting its own internal investigation. For them, the lack of a receipt from half a century ago or absolute proof is sufficient reason not to rewrite history.

However, the World Press Photo Foundation, the very same institution that awarded the image back in the day, has made a historic and radical decision. Faced with “significant doubt” and the impossibility of certainty, they have decided to suspend the attribution of the award to Nick Ut. They have not yet awarded it to Nghe, but they have withdrawn the official certainty. It is a tacit acknowledgment that the story we were told could be false.

The redemption of an invisible man

Beyond the technique and the controversy, “The Stringer: The Man Who Took The Photo” is a story about dignity. Director Bao Nguyen speaks of giving a voice to a generation of Vietnamese people who were marginalized, their stories absorbed by the Western narrative machine. Nghe is the face of all those anonymous collaborators.

The climax of this story did not happen in the jungle, but recently, at a film festival in the mountains of Utah. After the documentary screening, Nguyen Thanh Nghe, the invisible man, walked onto the stage. Facing a standing ovation, with the fragility of age but the firmness of truth, he simply said: “I took the photo.”

It was the closing of a cycle of silence that has lasted a lifetime. This documentary asks us not only to question a photo; it asks us to look at the margins of history, where the true protagonists who never made it into the credits reside.

Netflix

Netflix releases the documentary “The Stringer: The Man Who Took The Photo,” the story of the invisible man behind the world’s most visible photo

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