Man who claims he took iconic ‘Napalm Girl’ photo speaks out in Netflix doc

The man who claimed to have taken the iconic “Napalm Girl” photo that helped reshape the Vietnam War is speaking out in a new documentary, and the Associated Press is standing by the photographer who has gained a reputation for decades.

Netflix’s “The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo” focuses on the dispute over who took the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo seen around the world in 1972. The film claims that AP photographer Nick Ut was unfairly given credit, and that the filmmakers tracked down the real man allegedly behind the camera: Nguyễn Thành Nghệ.

In the documentary released by Netflix last week, Nghệ says, “Nick Ut came with me for this mission. But he did not take that photo. He only took a few photos from afar. That photo was mine.”

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“The AP officer accepted the photo and gave me a printout and the rest of the film. I gave the rest to a journalist in Saigon,” he continued, adding that he received $20 and took his friends out for drinks with the money.

The Vietnamese soldier said he “rarely” received praise for the photographs he took during the war, “only on some special occasions.”

The documentary has its origins in AP photo editor Carl Robinson, who was working in the Saigon bureau at the time the photo was taken. Robinson said he was directed by his superior at the time, respected photojournalist Horst Faas, to refer to Ut instead of Nghệ, and that he did so out of fear of losing his job, a decision that has haunted him for more than 50 years. Faas died in 2012 and Ut did not participate in the documentary.

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Gary Knight, photojournalist and executive producer of “The Stringer,” said Ut was “a victim in many ways.”

“As far as we know, I was never consulted,” Knight says in the film. “This was just given to him. So it’s a suicide pass, you know. Someone threw a hot rock at him.”

Retired Associated Press photographer Nick Ut was celebrated for his iconic “Napalm Girl” photo from the Vietnam War. (Alberto Pizzoli/AFP via Getty Images)

Associated Press published own extensive investigation He researched the origins of the photo earlier this year and concluded that “it is possible” Ut took the photo but cannot prove it conclusively “due to the passage of time, the deaths of many key players involved, and the limitations of technology.” There is “no evidence” that Nghệ took the photo, although the new findings raise unanswered questions and the AP admits it is open to the possibility that Ut did not take the photo.

“AP standards require that photo credits be removed if there is conclusive evidence that the person claiming to have taken the photo did not. In the absence of such evidence, photo credits will remain,” a spokesperson for the Associated Press said.

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AP photo editor Carl Robinson recalls how the “Napalm Girl” photo was featured in the Netflix documentary “The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo.” (Courtesy Netflix © 2025)

Ut’s attorney, James Hornstein, told Fox News Digital that the Netflix documentary did not present any new evidence to dispute that Ut took the photo, such as “no negatives, no contact sheets, no prints, no contemporaneous notes, and no photo archive,” and emphasized that it only suggested a “very narrow group of people” did not take the photo.

“Apart from Carl Robinson and his wife, who put forward a 50-year-delayed and unverified account of the events at the AP office, other proponents of the alternative thesis are Nguyen Thanh Nghệ himself and some members of his family,” Hornstein said in his statement. he said. “Not a single independent journalist based at Trảng Bàng supports this view. Not a single AP staff member working in Saigon on the day of the attack supports this. No documentary evidence—neither negative, not printed, nor contemporaneous contact sheet—supports it. And no historian, archivist, or photographic expert with access to AP archives has ever confirmed it.”

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He continued: “Given the broad coverage the photograph has received over the last half-century, the absence of wider support is striking. If credible evidence existed to challenge Nick Út’s authorship, it would not have been limited to a handful of individuals who emerged fifty years after the event, with accounts contradicting the overwhelming body of testimony at the time. The isolation of this thesis underscores the weight of the historical record and also highlights the speculative nature of the narrative presented in the documentary.”

Netflix did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.