News and the Abstract Truth

The new documentary "The Stringer" refutes over 50 years of celebrating the authorship of the iconic “Napalm Girl” photo from the coverage of the Vietnam War. Passions pro and con are running very high about whether the accusation is true. But the true nature of that controversy is pretty clear: one side wants to believe the accusation is true, and the other wants to believe it is not true. And in a time when viral disinformation is a norm, the problem with the documentary itself is even bigger: does its "evidence" at best merely prove what we want to believe, or does it instead just prove that we can’t know?

NOTE 1.

What price, Glory?

Real athletes work hard, doggedly, to get to a point where they can do something special. But for most athletes, that special moment surfaces by surprise, leaping out of an ongoing stream of committed but "usual" effort.

Sometimes, out of nowhere, the athlete arrives in “the zone”; everything is clicking, the hard is easy, and the success comes, but not accountable to anything done differently.

For most athletes, finding themselves in the zone just once, ever, is enough to justify all that came before it. It's a moment of self-actualization that transcends all other judgments and all lesser tries afterwards, too. It’s the achievement of a lifetime. It happened and can’t be taken away. And with luck, there were witnesses.

We photographers can go through such moments. The great part for us is that a “personal best” picture can hang around long after the initial moment, so the number of witnesses can just keep climbing. And the more witnesses there are, the better that “best” becomes, all to our credit.

Photographer Nick Út, credited for the amazing image popularly known as “Napalm Girl”, had such a moment in 1972; and the moment became permanently glorious. Út was declared the 1973 Pulitzer Prize winner for photojournalism, and the winner of the World Press Photo’s 1973 “Photo of the Year”.

Copyright: the Associated Press

But if we believe the claim made in the documentary, Nick’s real achievement may turn out to be that he won a lifetime of rewards for one score that wasn't his. Casting doubt on whether Út actually took the shot, the film could stop the ongoing celebration that he has enjoyed, and his glory could be taken away.

Game Changers

The provenance of “Napalm Girl” has not been questioned by anyone influential for decades. Legendary photo editor Horst Faas of the Associated Press (AP) is thought of as the AP’s journalistic and business hero of the time, racking up numerous industry awards for the news wire service and setting standards for peers.

The whole point of the “wire service” agency is to tell truths as news, so logically there is a continual and confident invitation to all comers to validate its sources. Faas set the publication credit for “Napalm Girl” to Nick Út, along with the actual title of the image, “The Terror of War”.

Upon its release by the AP, the image revised the course of history. A gruesome, unforgettable scene of unjust and unnecessary human suffering, “Napalm Girl” crystallized the horror that motivated the US anti-war movement and tipped public tolerance towards ending US involvement in Vietnam by any means necessary.

What the public takes for granted is that an AP attribution is beyond reproach.

But in the documentary “The Stringer”, a deep investigation triggered by a 2022 tip from a witness in 1972 argues that this decisive, career-defining moment for the photographer Út wasn’t actually his moment at all, embroiling him in a controversy that could revise his personal history as dramatically as the image impacted the war.

Business as Usual

In the news business, reporting something isn’t news if it isn’t saying what you haven’t already heard.

But mistakes are not hard to come by. In the rush to get the word out, journalists can stumble: what seems at first to be right can get undone by a closer and longer look.

Retractions, on the other hand, can be pretty hard to come by. If breaking news seems to have its footing in a gray area, the public is still the beneficiary of being alerted that something warrants inspection.  A news agency such as the AP is unlikely to apologize for trying, above all, to get a profoundly shocking news image such as “Napalm Girl” distributed asap. That end rationalizes whatever the means were.

On its own, the image has never been suspected of being anything other than truthful. And that is still the case.

Complicating the controversy about “The Stringer”, our contemporary culture is saturated with fabricated imagery, beginning with programmed television, and then (in order of increasing artifice) commercial film, social media, digital effects and editing tools, and generative “deep faking” A.I.

Against that, being factual is Photography’s original core value proposition, one made credible through scrutinizing the sourcing of facts. But our times now are deeply ironic: a full embrace of artifice despite equal cause for heightened skepticism. Prior to now, the “Napalm Girl” image itself was just so important that no one ultimately cared who made it, except for photographers.

Perhaps Út, an AP employee, did not make that picture: but so what? And what if the AP chief editor Faas intentionally credited the picture to an AP employee, namely Út, rather than allowing a non-AP freelancer (aka “stringer”) to be recognized as the originator of the picture? And if Faas did that, why was it possible and tolerated?

This is where the elaborate mechanisms of public recognition, awards, and rewards emerge as the biggest part of the excited controversy over the film. If Út is stripped of the credit that drove his ongoing celebrity, questions immediately arise as to whether he conspired to perpetuate a self-serving fiction at someone else’s expense. Looking into the matter as being a breach of ethics by both the photographer Út and the AP is not trivial, but the importance of the image overwhelmingly exceeded the importance of the photographer. Why do we care now about what happened then?

NOTE 2.

The Evident versus the Apparent

The problem with ethics is that usually they are circumscribed by context. AP’s standard procedure for crediting and releasing information may not ever have exceeded what was at the time acceptable practice. Said differently, no one may have considered AP’s decisions and actions to have been irresponsible.

On the other hand, if either or both Út and Faas knew that falsely crediting the picture to Út would deny the true image-maker of significant earned benefits, then the false crediting was immoral, regardless of other circumstances. That, however, is something that we, despite the film, don't know. 

This controversy is a story not about two actors but three.

The storyline: first, multiple photographers were on the scene when the village of Trảng Bàng was bombed with napalm, and one of them is the true source of that “decisive moment” picture, "The Terror of War".

Then there is ambiguity in the chain-of-evidence drama of how the negative was delivered from the photographer in the field to, eventually, chief AP editor Faas.

And finally, there is the response to the distribution of the image, pumping the AP and Út up to the pinnacle of its business and society's rewards.

Paralleling that plot of three decision points is the formula for the event’s value. There is first the credibility of the photographer’s known talent; second, the motivations of the editor; and third, the public’s desire to believe versus only to be informed. All three are presumed to be positive and benevolent, unless proved otherwise.

Of those three matters, the most important one is the third one. Why are we, as an audience today, the way we are? Increasingly, the audience prefers what it wants to believe over what it needs to know. But getting what it demands is not a good place from which to start objecting.

There is significant irony in the controversy over the documentary. The significance of the photo at hand was that it pierced the propaganda that supported conducting the war fifty to sixty years ago. But now, we are fully submerged, perhaps catastrophically, in the Era of Disinformation -- intentional use of information to fabricate an unproven reality, just as might propaganda. Whether as mistakes or imagination, proactively projecting the fabrication as truth risks exceeding anyone's personal recreation and becomes socially disruptive. The danger: bias, discrimination, and repression are collectively the fatal toxin of poly-cultural populations. And we accept more and more of it, anyway.

In that perspective, what “The Stringer” ultimately accomplishes is to tweak the public about its own complicity in the controversy over whether the right person got the credit for the photo.

We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us

"The Stringer" prosecutes. But the AP and its anointed photographer can stand their ground today when grilled about the past. Let’s review the case for the defense.

First, the Photographer: if Út didn’t make the photo, it is possible that he knew he didn’t and refused to say so for fifty years. Yet there is some possibility that he honestly believed he did make the picture.  Proving one or the other of those things now is a newsy drama that can overshadow the other issues (below) at hand, but either way it doesn’t weaken the historical importance and acceptance of the image in the public eye.

Second, the Agency: it has resisted, but not stonewalled, the pressure for transparency about its role and processes. The question is, if the AP in 1973 did not know who took the picture, would that have prevented it from being released asap as news? If the answer is yes, then a best-guess attribution, a plausible one, can be argued for its merit in supporting the public interest with the release. But there’s no reason for AP today to say that someone other than Út (in this case, freelance photographer Nguyen Thanh Nghe) made the photo if they don’t believe someone else did. The only evidence that matters is evidence available about 1972. 

But there is a third party, the Audience: this film's current controversy concerning honesty about authorship exists in a current climate of disinformation, wherein belief is preferred over facts. As a society we are increasingly guilty of attributing value only when proof supports our preference -- the basic formula for mythology. Against that condition, journalism’s challenge is to somehow still work as intended, but in a culture driven by commercial success and marketing prerogatives, can truth avoid being subordinated?

NOTE 3.

Conclusively Inconclusive

A big revision in history is a news event.

Often, the newsworthiness of the revision is that it exposes what was thought to be truth as not being the truth. With "The Stringer" we confront what we thought about photography, about news itself, and finally about ourselves.

The basic role of photography is usually presumed to be recording discovered facts, bearing witness. When what it conveys is intended to be news, its credibility is in the expectation that it is re-producing facts.

This highlights evaluating the reliability of news: the key has been to consider the source; we want to know how the facts were obtained. With news we factor in both its investigation and its investigator of its facts.

But also, the more impact the news has, the more we tend to credit the source as being special. In this dynamic, it is easy to assume that only special people are capable of breaking special news.

With "The Stringer", the special protagonists are the photographer, the editor, and the film's investigator Gary Knight. In our experience of the film, each of them is called into question. We first deal with it as a need for more facts.

But whereas news uncovers facts, documentary creates narratives. The power of facts is not just in being verified but in what they affect. In contrast, the power of narratives is in how they convince.

As documentary, photography goes beyond the basics. It is expected to find a story in the facts, or even to make one. And we expect the story to be convincing.

However, a major problem today, and going forward, is that we cannot presume that information in a photographic image is factual, and it gets increasingly difficult to verify.

“The Stringer” arrives at a time when both journalism at large and documentary photography face unprecedented challenges from information technologies, ones that present realism as an end product more than as a beginning condition of truth. Less a certainty, more a story. More an effect of of mediation than of medium.

In “The Stringer”, the ultimate importance of the facts is not about the photograph, nor the photographer. That is, this new film that wants to revise history is dramatic, but it doesn't affect the historical importance of the photograph.

Instead, its facts clearly raise issues about how we can, or whether we can, trust the news. They suggest potential ethical breaches that may have happened at the time – due to competition, racism, politics, money, or power. (Check all that apply.) Left standing, those conditions transcend any one case or event.

Additionally, the meaning of the film addresses the medium of photography itself. We've said that journalism gets the facts that become the material of a documentary's narrative. But on the surface,  the format of photo-documentation -- a capturing of facts -- has been a fundamental support for photo-journalism. Now, both together and separately, they are all called into question.

“The Stringer” throws all those factors into the same pot, a complex stew of those influences.

From doing that, the importance of the film's narrative is above all cautionary: that such breaches might still be “acceptable” today, energetically undermining the journalist's mission that some photographers have. Are they just as likely to mean future uncertainty or damage as might have occurred in the 1970s? How are we able to take responsibility for preventing that? Who are the mediators going forward? How does photojournalism survive?

And it is not without concern that compared to how a film can now be made, "The Stringer" itself is positively old school. What we need to embrace about it and in it is a focus on authenticity wherever we can find it, and determine how we can embed authenticity into the rapidly evolving future.

Title inspired by the album "Blues and the Abstract Truth" by saxophonist Oliver Nelson, recorded in February 1961 for the Impulse! label.