A new Sundance documentary, which questions the provenance of a Vietnam War icon, has set off a pitched battle between photojournalists and the filmmakers.
It is understandable that such an allegation would also raise hackles at AP. Santiago Lyon, a former vice president and director of photography at the news agency, tells me: “The AP is like a religious order. They are the Jesuits of the news business. They revere the truth. They have a pantheon of [photographic] idols: The Hindenburg. The burning monk. Iwo Jima. Eddie Adams’s Vietnam execution photo. And on and on. For somebody to come to the church and question their connection to the truth of a picture is unnerving to them.”
The Stringer, through its exhaustive detective work, succeeds in making a persuasive, if circumstantial, case in Nghe’s favor. The film goes to great lengths in its attempts to show that even though Ut photographed Kim Phuc on the day in question, Ut appears not to have been in the proper position to have made the crucial frame. Forensic analysts in the documentary—using satellite imagery, still and video footage from the day, and three-dimensional models—come to the same conclusion.