News and the Abstract Truth

The new documentary "The Stringer" refutes over 50 years of celebrating Nick Út's authorship of the iconic “Napalm Girl” photo from the coverage of the Vietnam War. Since the film saw its public release at Sundance, passions pro and con have been running very high about its accusation that the prize-winning photo was credited to the wrong photographer. But most of the controversy is fueled not by the facts the film presents. Rather, it is that one side wants to believe the accusation is true, and the other wants to believe it is not true. In a time when viral disinformation is a norm, the film as a documentary faces a big challenge: 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 rarely, and by surprise, leaping out of an ongoing stream of committed but "just the 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.

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

Vietnamese photographer Nick Út, credited for the amazing image popularly known as “Napalm Girl”, had such a moment in 1972, and that 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”. Decades later, he is still feted for it, on the record and in live appearances.

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 Horst Faas, the Associated Press (AP) chief of photo operations in Saigon who published the picture in 1972, 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 quality standards for peers.

The whole point of a “wire service” agency such as AP 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 the photo to Nick Út, along with the formal 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, it crystallized the horror that motivated the US anti-war movement and tipped public tolerance, leading towards finally ending US involvement in Vietnam.

What the public has taken for granted, then and now, is that an attribution by the Associated Press 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 properly his moment at all. It has embroiled him in a controversy that could revise his personal history as dramatically as the image revised the course of 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, which creates some leeway if not approval.  

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. and on its own, the image has never been suspected of being anything other than truthful. That end rationalized whatever the means were.

In contrast, although “The Stringer” showed explicit diligence in the film makers' pursuit of evidence, it is treated by many among its audience as an ambiguous film about an ambiguous event.

This could surely be a sign of the times. Our contemporary culture complicates the controversy over the film's central accusation. We are saturated with fabricated imagery, beginning with programmed television, and then (in order of increasing artifice) commercial film, social media, special effects and digital editing tools, and generative “deep faking” A.I. We  are used to fully embracing that artifice even as we, ironically, hold a heightened skepticism of it. It's today's convenient practice of a "suspension of disbelief".

This makes it easy to ask why the film's concern about authorship is even important. After all, given how important the image was, who other than photographers ultimately cares about which photographer took it?

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? After all, if Faas did that, well, it was both possible and tolerated.

Against that,  photography's original core value proposition is being factual. It is a claim made more credible through scrutinizing a photo's sourcing of the information it presents. In the case of crediting "Napalm Girl", the film questions that credibility, looking into the matter as being a breach of ethics by both the photographer Út and the AP.

This is where the elaborate mechanisms of public demand -- including recognition, awards, and rewards -- surface as central to both the notion of wrongdoing in the film and the excited controversy over the film.

If Út is stripped of the credit that drove his ongoing celebrity, the implication immediately arises that he conspired to perpetuate a self-serving fiction at someone else’s expense. Yet half of the film audience is willing to discount the evidence. Among Út's supporters, he is not found innocent, but he's not found guilty.

NOTE 2.

The Evident versus the Apparent

The problem with ethics is that usually they are circumscribed by context.

In 1972, AP’s standard procedure for crediting and releasing information may not ever have exceeded what was at the time acceptable in public and business as practice. Said differently, no one at the time 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 any other circumstances.

Based on what "The Stringer" offers, how would we know which is the case? Well, in fact, both things can be true, and arguably that is the version of things that finds the most support from the limited evidence generated so far, whether by the accusers or the accused.

The storyline: first, multiple photographers were on the scene when the village of Trảng Bàng was bombed with napalm, but only 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, AP's Saigon bureau chief Faas.

And finally, there is the intentional distribution of the image which required Faas to break a standing AP censorship policy, but as a result pumping the AP and Út up to the pinnacle of its business and society's rewards.

Paralleling that plot of three decisive points is a three-part formula for justifying the usual story of what is believed to have happened. There is first the reputation of the photographer’s known talent; second, the motivations of the editor; and third, the public’s desire to be informed. All three of those influences -- talent, motivation, and desire -- are presumed to be positive and benevolent, unless proved otherwise.

Of those three matters, the most important one today is the third one, the audience's influence on information. Increasingly, today, the audience prefers what it wants to believe over what it needs to know, the recipe for myth-making and propaganda. That makes the controversial reception of the documentary even more ironic: the subject photo of the film was important precisely because it pierced the propaganda that supported conducting the war fifty to sixty years ago.

Meanwhile, the filmmakers believe this documentary pierces the propaganda of Nick Út's celebrity.

We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us

It seems almost quaint to spend so much time on one bit of possible misinformation. But today, we are fully submerged in an Era of Disinformation -- the intentional use of information to fabricate an unproven illusion of reality.

Beyond mistakes or imagination, fabrications posing as truth can go further, exceeding any individual's personal tolerance or recreation, such as with propaganda.

The danger: the excess risks becoming socially disruptive. As the Washington Post would put it: "Democracy Dies in Darkness." In poly-cultural populations like ours, bias, discrimination, manipulation, and repression are collectively a destructive toxin.

Yet we accept more and more fabricated information anyway. That acceptance also fosters a demand for it, one that overlooks the risks. As an audience, do we take responsibility for our own demand?

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.

NOTE 3.

Public Opinion on Trial

"The Stringer" prosecutes.

But the AP and its anointed photographer defend. Let’s review the case.

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 1972 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 conditions in 1972. 

But in this court case, there is a third party, the Audience. This film's current controversy concerning honesty about authorship exists in a current climate of fabricated information being normalized, and wherein belief is preferred over facts. As a society we are increasingly guilty of attributing value to information only when "proof" supports our preference -- the basic formula for myth-making.

In our culture, marketers and politicians know that all too well, and literally spend billions of dollars a year to keep us predisposed that way. Against that condition, journalism’s challenge is to somehow still work as intended, presenting factual truth. But in a culture where perspective is driven by marketing and ideology, can truth avoid being subordinated?

NOTE 4.

Conclusively Inconclusive

A big revision of 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 confidence that it is re-producing facts.

In evaluating the reliability of news, the key has always been to "consider the source" -- we want to know how the facts were obtained. With news we factor in both the investigative method and the 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, as if the news would otherwise not come to light.

With "The Stringer", the special protagonists are the "Napalm Girl" photographer (in this case, whether Nick Út freelance photographer Nguyen Thanh Nghe), the photo editor Carl Robinson, and the photo publisher Horst Faas. In the story within the film, each of them is called into question. We first deal with that 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. Stories can be even more suspect.

“The Stringer” arrives at a time when both journalism at large and documentary photography in particular, face unprecedented challenges from information technologies, ones that present reality as synthetic, 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.

But even without that problem, “The Stringer” is challenged to argue facts in a most believable way. It toils in the problem of truth, but it depends on the nature of proof. It's a film that wants to revise history. But the film wants its facts to sell the story, while we in the audience want its story to sell its facts. This burden falls on the film's investigator (and originator) photographer Gary Knight.

On the surface, "The Stringer" appears to be an exposé-- Gary Knight's story of how one person stole from another and was celebrated for doing it. The allegation and its possible veracity is dramatic news.

But beneath that surface, the drama in the history is not about the photograph or the photographer. It is about the way they both were used. The way they were used broadens the message of the film: it is about photography as a medium and about making news, in both cases about the nature of "truth".

NOTE 5.

The reality of appearance

We expect journalism (at least through research) to get the facts that become the material of a documentary's narrative.

Photo-documentation -- a practice of capturing facts -- has been a fundamental support for documentary narrative that positions journalism's stories as reusable fact.

It is the two-way interaction between fact-finding and storytelling that explains how photography is a medium. But, as procedures, documentation and narrative are now each called into question by the film.

That is despite the film's detractors accusing it of being the very example of what it aims to attack: a fabrication driven by suspicious motives.

The film's presentation of facts clearly raises questions about whether, and how, we can trust the news. Its facts argue that in 1972 potential breaches of ethical news practice may have happened– due to competition, racism, politics, money, or power. (Check all that apply.) The story in “The Stringer”, whether its specific accusation is true or not,  portrays our vulnerability to such influence.

Its relevance today is that those conditions are persistent, and so is our vulnerability. Left unchecked, they transcend any one case or event, and run deeper than any particular communication channel.

In the film we are shown the resulting harm caused. We see the loss of opportunity, the denial of rightful recognition, and a resignation to a meager and obscure life -- that befell the photographer who possibly was denied due credit.

And we don't need to amplify the facts much to suspect underlying bias, discrimination, and manipulation. Now, in reactions to the film, the backlash to the very idea of such exploitation damages others in the story as well, with longstanding friendships and reputations at the top of the at-risk list.

NOTE 6.

Authorship, Authority, and Authenticity

It is important to hold on to the value of "Napalm Girl" as truth-telling, even if the editorial process that authorized its release was flawed, and even if the person claiming credit doesn't offer convincing evidence of being the true author. We don't know what would have happened if a different photographer, and/or a different publisher, had come out with this picture.

But the documentary's call to action is not to convict Nick Út nor the AP for their past. Rather, the AP's final pronouncement on the film's accusation is that they can't prove it is false but they also can't prove that it's true. This conclusion is unacceptable as a status of any future journalistic work released by AP as news.

The overall importance of the film is mainly cautionary: that accepting such failures of ethics and practice actively undermines the journalist's mission, and when that happens, there will be significant negative consequences.

Even more essential, as "The Stringer" Executive Producer Gary Knight commented in a recent live interview, journalists are neither elected nor appointed by the public -- and yet journalists are expected to hold everyone accountable. That can't work if journalists don't show that they hold themselves to the highest standard of accountability. This makes determination of authorship required in principle; it is about the practices, not about the image.

But what we most need to embrace about the film is that its focus on authenticity in truth is a two-way street; both the journalist and the audience are responsible. Who are the mediators of truth going forward?

Together we need to demand authenticity in both sides of the matter and determine how we can embed it into the rapidly evolving future.

So far, today' conditions, including culture and technologies, are even more likely to make news work unreliable or to cause damage. How are we to take responsibility for preventing that?

Postscript #1

Quoting a line used in a 1944 column by George Orwell, "history is written by the winners."

Postscript #2

The most significant reaction so far to the findings in the film is the perfect clarity of the World Press Photo Foundation. It declared the photographer of the picture to be anonymous; but the award it gave is about the photo, not about the photographer, and is unchanged.

Postscript #3

The documentary photography of the American Civil War is most famously credited to Matthew Brady. Yet we know, over 160 years later, that 15 or more different photographers had their work credited to Brady, including two very famous ones, Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan. We also know today that a photograph so influential that it was banned in China -- the so called "Tank Man" picture -- was thought to be pro-Chinese propaganda by its initial authorized Chinese distributor, but taken as anti-Chinese propaganda by its non-Chinese audiences worldwide, causing the Chinese government to attempt to eradicate the image post-publishing.

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