Agencies Press

The World Press Photo group has suspended the attribution of authorship for one on the most famous press photographs ever taken, after a new documentary challenged 50 years of accepted journalism history, the Guardian reported.

The photo, officially titled The Terror of War but colloquially known as Napalm Girl, remains one of the most indelible images of the US war in Vietnam. Since its publication in June 1972, it has been officially attributed to Nick Ut, a Vietnamese photographer working with the Associated Press in Saigon.

The AP and Ut have long maintained that Ut, then 21 years old, took the photo, which went on to win the World Press Photo of the Year award in 1973 and established Ut as a venerable photojournalist.

But a recent documentary challenged that history, instead proposing that the photo, which depicts a naked nine-year-old girl named Phan Thi Kim Phuc as she flees a napalm attack in the South Vietnamese village of Trảng Bàng, was taken by a man named Nguyen Thành Nghe. 

The Stringer, which premiered at the Sundance film festival in January, claimed that Nghe, a driver for NBC who sold photos to the AP as a freelancer, was denied credit in favor of Ut because he was not AP staff.

The film prompted “deep reflection” at World Press Photo, which conducted its own investigation, the results of which were made public on Friday 16 May. 

The in-house analysis, conducted between January and May 2025, concluded “based on analysis of location, distance, and the camera used on that day” that “photographers Nguyễn Thành Nghệ or Huỳnh Công Phúc may have been better positioned to take the photograph than Nick Út.”