Fifty-Three Years of Settled History — Then Sundance 2025
On June 8, 1972, a nine-year-old girl named Kim Phuc ran screaming down Route 1 in Trang Bang, South Vietnam, her back seared by napalm accidentally dropped by South Vietnamese aircraft on their own civilians. The photograph taken that day — officially titled The Terror of War but universally known as Napalm Girl — became one of the most powerful images of the twentieth century. It shaped American public opinion on the Vietnam War, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973, and has been reproduced in textbooks, museum exhibitions, and documentary films for more than five decades. Its author, according to the Associated Press, was Nick Ut, a 21-year-old Vietnamese-born AP staff photographer.
For fifty-three years, that attribution was considered settled fact. Then came Sundance 2025.
The Documentary That Shook Photojournalism’s Foundations
In January 2025, filmmaker Bao Nguyen premiered The Stringer at the Sundance Film Festival — a documentary that argues, through testimony and forensic evidence, that the photograph was actually taken by Nguyen Thanh Nghe, a local Vietnamese photographer working that day as a freelance stringer for AP. The film contends that Nguyen Thanh Nghe was positioned closer to Kim Phuc when she ran toward the road, that he triggered the shutter at the decisive moment, and that the credit was subsequently transferred to Nick Ut.
The international photojournalism community responded swiftly. In May 2025, World Press Photo announced it was suspending the photo’s attribution to Nick Ut pending an independent investigation. It was an unprecedented move for an image of this historical magnitude. The New York Times, The Guardian, and Le Monde all covered the story prominently. AP issued a statement defending its historical records while acknowledging that an independent review was appropriate. Nick Ut, now retired and living in the United States, firmly and publicly denied the documentary’s claims.
The Forensic Challenge: Proving Authorship Without Digital Metadata
At the center of the dispute are the original negatives held in the AP archive. Unlike digital photographs, which embed EXIF data — including timestamp, GPS coordinates, camera serial number, and lens information — analog film carries no such metadata. Attribution in 1972 rested entirely on the word of the photographer present, the agency’s internal filing procedures, and contemporaneous witness testimony.
What the Negatives Can and Cannot Prove
Forensic photo analysts examining the negative strips can attempt to determine whether the sequence of images taken on June 8, 1972, is consistent with a single camera or multiple cameras, and whether frame spacing and exposure patterns match known characteristics of specific camera models. These are probabilistic assessments, not definitive proof. The chain of custody for these negatives spans more than half a century and multiple organizational changes.
Nguyen Thanh Nghe, who would have been the most important witness, died before the documentary was completed, leaving no possibility of direct cross-examination. Kim Phuc herself has expressed profound distress at the controversy, stating publicly that she wishes the world would focus on the suffering depicted in the image rather than its authorship.
The Stringer System: A Structural Problem
To understand how this dispute was possible, it is necessary to understand how wire services operated in Vietnam during the war. The AP, Reuters, UPI, and other major agencies employed a network of local Vietnamese photographers known as stringers — freelancers paid per published image, without staff contracts, benefits, or formal intellectual property agreements.
Credit Practices in the Field
Multiple photojournalism historians have documented that stringer images were frequently credited to the nearest available staff photographer for a variety of reasons: editorial simplicity, commercial brand consistency, and in some cases the genuine belief that the staff photographer — who was often present at the scene — had taken the shot. In a chaotic warzone environment, with multiple photographers shooting simultaneously and film being rushed back to the bureau for immediate transmission, the chain of attribution was far from rigorous.
Legal Dimensions: Copyright and Moral Rights
Under US copyright law as it existed in 1972, a photograph taken by an employee within the scope of their employment was considered a “work for hire” belonging to the employer. A stringer’s relationship to an agency was more ambiguous. Under French law and the broader continental European tradition, droits moraux — moral rights, including the right to attribution — are inalienable and cannot be contracted away. Had Nguyen Thanh Nghe been operating under French jurisdiction, his right to be credited as author could theoretically still be asserted today by his estate.
Why This Matters Beyond One Photograph
The Crisis of Visual Authenticity
In 2023 and 2024, several high-profile cases demonstrated that AI-generated images could be mistaken for authentic photojournalism. The Reuters photographer who submitted an AI-edited image to the World Press Photo competition in 2024 — and was subsequently disqualified — illustrated how blurred the line between authentic documentation and artificial generation has become. If we cannot reliably determine who took a photograph in 1972 from a physical negative, the challenge of authenticating images created in 2025 — where a realistic deepfake can be generated in seconds — is exponentially greater.
The Exploitation of Local Photographers
The Stringer documentary also reignites a long-standing debate about the treatment of local photographers by international news organizations. A 2022 report by the International Federation of Journalists found that freelance photographers, particularly those working in the Global South, remain significantly more vulnerable to credit appropriation, payment disputes, and contract violations than their staff counterparts at major agencies.
Blockchain Certification: The Technical Answer to an Old Problem
How Cryptographic Attribution Works
A blockchain-based certification system such as Certiphy generates a unique cryptographic hash of a digital image at the moment of creation or first upload. This hash — a mathematical fingerprint of the file — is then written to a public blockchain alongside associated metadata: the creator’s verified identity, the date and time of certification, device information, and geolocation data if available. Because blockchain entries are immutable and distributed across thousands of nodes, no single party can alter or delete the record retroactively.
In practical terms, this means that a photographer in a conflict zone who certifies their image immediately after capture creates a tamper-proof timestamped proof of authorship that is legally meaningful and technically verifiable by anyone — including a court, an archive, or a journalism ethics panel — decades later.
Industry Initiatives Moving in This Direction
The Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), co-founded by Adobe, Twitter, and The New York Times Company, has developed the C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) technical standard, which embeds signed metadata directly into image files at the point of capture. As of 2024, camera manufacturers including Leica, Nikon, and Sony have begun integrating C2PA-compatible signing into professional camera firmware. The BBC, Reuters, and the Associated Press are all participating members of the CAI.
What Would Have Changed in 1972
Had a blockchain certification system existed and been deployed in the AP’s Vietnam bureau in 1972, the outcome of the current dispute would almost certainly be different. The camera that captured Napalm Girl would have generated a cryptographic signature tied to a specific device and a verified photographer identity. That signature would be retrievable today, providing a mathematically certain answer to the question of authorship — one that no documentary film, however compelling, could credibly challenge.
The Broader Stakes: History, Memory, and Truth
Should the World Press Photo investigation conclude that Nguyen Thanh Nghe was the true author of Napalm Girl, the consequences would extend far beyond a credit line correction. The Pulitzer Prize awarded in 1973 would require review. Hundreds of museum exhibitions, educational curricula, and licensed reproductions would need updating. The legal question of who holds copyright and moral rights to one of the most reproduced photographs in history would become the subject of complex international litigation.
Conclusion: Attribution as a Human Right
The Napalm Girl dispute is, at its core, about a fundamental right: the right of a creator to be recognized as the author of their work. That right was denied — whether by negligence, convention, or deliberate choice — to a Vietnamese photographer who risked his life to document one of the most important events of the twentieth century.
The investigation is ongoing. Whatever its conclusion, it has already demonstrated, with painful clarity, that without verified, immutable proof of authorship created at the moment of capture, the historical record is always vulnerable to dispute, revision, and erasure.
The tools to prevent this from happening again exist today. The question is whether the industry will adopt them before the next Napalm Girl is created without a traceable author.
Explore our latest analysis on image authenticity and intellectual property rights in our news section, and learn how Certiphy’s certification technology protects photographers and creators at every stage of their workflow.
