The Case of the Pentax Negatives that Didn’t Bark

At the end of my previous post, I asked whether the filmmakers who produced The Stringer missed anything they might have discovered had the VII Foundation arranged to collaborate on this investigation with the Associated Press. (Note: in the film, the foundation’s co-founder, Gary Knight, suggests such cooperation to an AP spokesperson, but apparently they could not come to mutually agreeable terms toward that end.)

I believe there is in fact a solid case to be made that Nick Ut did not take the photograph known as “Napalm Girl.” Neither The Stringer nor the Associated Press report nor the World Press Photo report make that case, though they each provide some of its components.

Here’s how I would lay out that case, with parenthetical indications of the source of each component. A few of these come from the unpublished, independent private report I mentioned in a previous post. However, this case does not stand or fall based on them.

• Nick Ut has consistently claimed that he made “Napalm Girl” with a Leica M2. (The Stringer, AP report, WPP report, plus multiple video, film, and print articles and interviews over the years.)

• AP’s Saigon press bureau chief Horst Faas also identified “Napalm Girl” as a Leica negative. (The Stringer, AP report.)

• Regardless of that, “AP’s conclusion from the technical analysis is that it is likely the ‘Terror of War’ photograph was not taken on a Leica camera, and further, that it is likely that it was taken with a Pentax camera.” (AP report.)

• It is possible to distinguish between negatives made with Nikons, Leicas, and Pentaxes of the period. Briefly put, each has unmistakable characteristics: the exposed areas consistently differ slightly but measurably in size. Moreover, both Nikon and Leica negatives have sharp corners in their exposed areas, whereas Pentax negatives have rounded ones. (AP report.)

• Some photographers of that era filed notches into one or another edge of the frame gate — the rectangular opening behind the lens through which the film gets exposed to light — as a visible “signature” for that particular camera’s negatives. The “Napalm Girl” negative does not show any such notching. (AP report.)

• Beyond that, however, in every individual 35mm camera the frame gate develops minute but detectable idiosyncrasies over time: bits of wear and tear that show up consistently along the frame’s edges. Comparison of negatives or full-frame enlargements thereof can enable the determination of which specific camera made a particular negative. The “Napalm Girl” negative shows such distinctive characteristics. (Private report.)

• AP reproduced all of Ut’s surviving negatives (color and b&w) from his June 8, 1972 Trang Bang shoot — roughly 84 negatives out of a total of eight 36-exposure rolls submitted that day. This includes only two identifiable as Pentax negatives — “Napalm Girl” and the succeeding frame on that roll. (AP report.)

• The UPI photo of the scene at Trang Bang that includes Nghe identifiably shows him from the front, holding a Pentax SLR camera. (The Stringer.)

• No photo or film of Ut at Trang Bang shows him using, holding, or carrying a Pentax. (AP report, private report.)

• In the film, Nghe confirms that he worked with a Pentax Spotmatic with a 50mm lens (at timestamp 50:14:00). However, Gary Knight doesn’t pursue this further in that interview clip, and the film as a whole doesn’t make anything more of it — even in the augmented version released after the filmmakers had access to the AP report. (The Stringer.)

• By his own account, Nghe normally kept no negative files. He didn’t retain his unsold outtakes, but instead turned any negatives of war scenes he couldn’t sell over to one or another journalist in Saigon. He also states that he left his camera and any other negatives behind in Vietnam when he and his family fled the country in 1975, one month before the fall of Saigon. So neither his Pentax camera nor any of his negatives remain for purposes of inspection and comparison. (The Stringer.)

• Nick Ut’s standard kit on assignment included two Nikon SLRs and two Leica M2s. Two of these were normally loaded with color film, two with b&w film. From the AP report: “In previous interviews, Ut has said he was carrying two Leicas and two Nikons that day.” Photos and films of him at Trang Bang that day show him with all four of those cameras identifiable and hung around his neck, ready for use. Though these images show him from various angles, no Pentax is visible on his person. (AP report, WPP report, private report.)

• Ut owned two Pentax Spotmatics that he inherited from his older brother, Huynh Thanh My, who preceded him as an AP staff photographer and was killed while covering the war. Ut has claimed that he carried one of them with him on assignments, as a talisman. (AP report.)

• “In several interviews about the photograph, Ut has stated that he carried four cameras and never mentioned a Pentax. However, AP’s analysis of Vietnam-era photography showed that negatives with the characteristics of a Pentax were held in the AP archive and were credited to Huynh Thanh My [Ut’s older brother] and to Ut himself. The number of photographs found show that he did not use a Pentax often, but he did use one while covering the war in Vietnam.” (AP report.)

• This opens the possibility that, despite his insistence for many years that he made the “Napalm Girl” exposure with a Leica, Ut actually used a Pentax instead. However, to do so he’d have had to ignore his four other cameras, all immediately at hand, in order to fish around in his camera bag for that Pentax. From the standpoint of professional practice, that makes little sense in a fast-moving situation where every second counts. (Private report.)

• Ut would then also have had to forget completely that, untypically, he elected to use his brother’s Pentax for those exposures, and substitute a Leica for it in all his subsequent retellings of the events. (The Stringer.)

• The negative of “Napalm Girl” resides in AP’s New York facility, along with other Ut images from that day and that period of time. This is not a complete archive of Ut’s work for AP in Vietnam, as the elisions in his Trang Bang take make obvious. “Standard practice in AP bureaus in the 1970s, including Saigon, was for the negatives of published photographs to be shipped to New York along with any other images deemed important enough. Unused negatives would be offered back to the photographer or thrown away.” As in Nghe’s case, AP also left a lot behind when evacuating its Saigon office. Material that did make that cut sometimes got discarded in New York. Other relevant material is possibly misfiled. (AP report.)

• Nonetheless, if the remaining portions of Ut’s Trang Bang coverage — some 84 exposures, including both color and b&w — typify what survived, AP’s archival holdings of Ut’s Vietnam work must number in the thousands of negatives, including some more made with his Pentaxes. According to AP, “In previous interviews, Ut has said he was carrying two Leicas and two Nikons that day. When questioned by AP, he said he also used Pentax cameras. AP found negatives in its archives shot by Ut in Vietnam that had the characteristics of a Pentax camera.” (AP report.)

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What’s interesting to me about all this, beyond its evident value as raw data, is that it constitutes a version of the Sherlock Holmes mystery centered around a dog that didn’t bark. The answer to the question of whether or not Nick Ut made the “Napalm Girl” photograph stares us in the face. AP holds the negative of “Napalm Girl” that the agency has determined he made with a Pentax. AP holds numerous other Ut negatives that the agency has determined he also made with a Pentax. Therefore, AP is now — and has always been — in a position to compare the negative of “Napalm Girl” with its other Ut Pentax negatives (or full-frame prints thereof). If they find even one that matches its unique characteristics then, ipso facto, Ut’s attribution is vindicated. Conversely, if they don’t have a single Ut Pentax negative to match “Napalm Girl” then it’s extremely unlikely he made that image.

Only the Associated Press can conduct the relevant tests and answer that question. To its credit, the AP report does come to the conclusion that “Napalm Girl” was made with a Pentax, and documents its analysis well. If I could figure out the logical next step after that, as I managed to do in the above, I consider it probable that the AP’s investigative team did the same. The burden of proof/disproof, then, rests squarely on AP’s shoulders.

On that basis, it would be easy to shut down Nghe’s claim by presenting specific, verifiable evidence sufficient to establish Ut’s authorship. Yet the AP report doesn’t go there, though it tiptoes right up to the edge of that test — and then carefully steps back. If that’s not a peculiar, inexplicable oversight on the part of the AP team, then they made a deliberate choice to avoid going down that path, and carefully crafted their report to cover their traces. Either way, those are the Pentax negatives that didn’t bark.

This analysis depends only minimally on the various first-person interviews in the film. It does not depend in any way on the memories of the people involved, beyond such matters as Ut’s assertion that he used a Leica and owned a Pentax. Anyone who cares to can verify all of the points made in the logical sequence above by paying careful attention to the publicly available still, film, and video documentation.

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As I wrote in an earlier post, The Stringer levels two serious charges at former Associated Press staff photographer Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut:

• First, that he colluded in the false attribution to him of the iconic 1972 Vietnam war photo titled “The Terror of War” (and informally referred to as “Napalm Girl”), accepting credit for it and actively claiming it as his own, thereby depriving its true author — Vietnamese freelancer or “stringer” Nguyen Thanh Nghe — of the recognition due him for making that image.

• Second, that he has also falsely claimed to have stopped photographing and left the scene shortly after making that photo in order to transport the wounded girl, Kim Phuc, to a nearby hospital, out of humanitarian motives.

These are serious charges, whose circulation worldwide via The Stringer will undoubtedly do permanent damage to Ut’s professional and personal reputations. Indeed, World Press Photo withdrew its attribution to him of its 1973 “Picture of the Year” award just months after the film’s premiere. (Note: the award to the photo itself still stands.) Perhaps next year’s defamation trial in the French courts will enumerate other actual consequences of the film’s accusations. Certainly they will haunt Ut till his dying day, and loom large in his obituaries.

VII Foundation, The Stringer (2025), release promo, screenshot

The filmmakers surely foresaw such eventualities. So it behooved them, from a precautionary standpoint, to anticipate the inevitable litigation and build into their project enough hard evidence to persuade a panel of French judges that the charges have merit and credibility.

To repeat: I am not a lawyer. I have only a passing familiarity with U.S. defamation law, which differs in several ways from French defamation law. For example, does truth carry the same weight in French cases that it does in the States? What if one can prove the truth of the film’s charges, but the film itself does not contain all the necessary proof?

In this post and the one preceding it I have laid out what I consider to be the elements of strong cases supporting both charges. The Stringer contains some of those elements, but some key pieces come from other sources. Therefore, as I see it, the film makes neither of those cases clearly and incontrovertibly.

Because it concentrates on first-person testimony while paying scant attention to this important physical evidence, I find The Stringer persuasive and even compelling, as I wrote earlier, but not conclusive. In my opinion, it fails to make an effective evidentiary case to support the charges it levels. We’ll have to wait a year to see what impact that failure will have on the French court’s decision.

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While I was finalizing this post, Nick Ut’s lawyers, James Hornstein and Martin Pradel, issued a press release on their criminal defamation lawsuit against Gary Knight, the VII Foundation, and Netflix (including various officials thereof), along with the 89-page suit itself and the supporting documents, as filed in a French court. You can download PDFs of any or all of these public documents by using the links in the previous sentence.

As I’ve anticipated in the post above and its predecessors in this series, Ut’s suit concentrates on The Stringer‘s two main accusations: that Ut participated in the false attribution to him of “Napalm Girl,” and that he falsely claimed to have stopped photographing that day in order to transport Kim Phuc to a local hospital. Also as I anticipated, the suit relies entirely on first-person/eyewitness testimony, spoken and/or written, discounting the Blender reconstruction of the scene in the film and disregarding in its entirety the visual evidence — still photos, films, videos — painstakingly gathered and analyzed in the Associated Press and World Press Photo reports. Thereby it positions itself as little more than one side of a he said / he said contest of competing personal narratives, rather than a forensics-based refutation of the accusations.

In this choice of strategy it parallels the film — which may prove to be the weakness of the suit, as it has shown itself (in my opinion) the weakness of the film. So far as I can tell, this suit merely doubles down on the received, anecdotal version of the events; it brings nothing new to the table insofar as concrete evidence of any kind goes. Fortunately for the defendants, that opens the door for them to do so. Will they seize the opportunity? And will AP decide to conduct the forensic test they have sidestepped to date? Time will tell. …

(To be continued.)

Part 1 I 2 I 3 I 4

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