The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo 2025 Movie Review
It was an awful case of friendly fire: On June 8, 1972, South Vietnamese bomber pilots mistook a group of soldiers and civilians in Trang Bang, Vietnam for enemies, and launched napalm – a highly volatile and flammable chemical weapon – at them. In the ensuing chaos, a group of children dashed away from the explosion, one of whom, nine-year-old Kim Phuc, had stripped off all her burning clothes, revealing significant burns on her arms and torso. A cadre of journalists captured the scene with stills and moving footage. One of those stills was Napalm Girl, pulled from rolls of film turned in to the Associated Press by freelance photographers, many of them local Vietnamese journalists, who were paid in cash on the spot. AP photo editor Carl Robinson remembers his boss, a classically intimidating journo named Horst Faas, pulling the standout shot. Faas told Robinson to credit the photo to AP staffer Nick Ut. Robinson, knowing it wasn’t Ut’s photo, did as he was told.
Now, more than a half-century later, Robinson regrets his decision not to push back against those orders. He reached out to Gary Knight, himself a war photographer who launched the esteemed membership-owned VII Photo Agency, to share the story. Knight found the story credible, believing Robinson personally has nothing to gain by telling it, and began a two-year investigation, hoping to pinpoint the real author of the photo. To say this is a big deal is an understatement. Ut won the Pulitzer in 1973 for the shot, and went on to considerable acclaim while working for the AP for 51 years. Upending the story would require taking on a long-established journalistic institution, not to mention ripping up and rewriting a page or two of history.
But, Knight asserts, journalists must pursue the truth even if it means questioning their own. So he tracks down people who were present that horrible day in Trang Bang, journalists and survivors of the attack, and works with other experts to eventually track down Nguyen Thang Nghe, who by many accounts is the true credited photographer. Nghe is alive and living in California when Knight tracks him down; Nghe was a stringer who recalls taking the shot, being paid and given a print of Napalm Girl by AP editors. His children recall seeing the print at home, and their now-deceased mother being upset by it and throwing it away, thus destroying Nghe’s only proof of authorship. Meanwhile, Knight hires a third-party group of forensic investigators to pour over the findings of his research. They use film footage, stills and maps to reconstruct the events of June 8, 1972 as digital 3-D models, and determine who was present and where they were positioned before, during and after the photo was taken. The result is pretty compelling, in support of Nghe’s claims. Notably, Ut did not agree to participate in the documentary.
If all this is indeed true – and what Bao Nguyen and Knight put together is pretty convincing – then it points at a number of ideas churning in the text and subtext of The Stringer. First is the title itself, which clearly reflects the power dynamic at play in this story, where news organizations stump harder for their staffers than the freelance “stringers” who face all the same risks, but get paid by the piece, have little employment stability and no benefits, and are “strung along” by editors, hence the label (I’d also note they experience freedom from a lot of corporate bureaucracy and other day-to-day work drudgery, and I speak from experience).
The why of it all is most curious, and some interviewees reveal how old-school editors like Haas, who died in 2012, played favorites, preferring to champion photographers who didn’t have “funny names,” and had more status in the news world than lowly stringers. And so there’s a vein of racism and classism in this story, and we’re left with the impression that Haas made a decision flippantly, and without consideration for the number of people who’d be affected by it. The implication is that powerless individuals like Nghe wouldn’t fight back against an established journalistic behemoth. Meanwhile, the truth has eaten away at Nghe and his family, along with Robinson, witnesses and other journalists who’ve been privy to this “open secret” for decades.
Knight serves as a kind of a doula for this story, a knowledgeable expert guiding it to a healthy emergence into the public consciousness. He and Nguyen make sure The Stringer is earnest, diligent and professional in its procedural details, and the result is an engrossing film about the ethics of journalism and the power dynamics that undermine it. And like the best documentary filmmakers do, Knight and Nguyen don’t plant flags in the ground and defend them – the truth can be fluid and elusive, and like theoretical mathematics, which explore the notion that numbers don’t truly exist, and that we can only “approach” them, coming as close as possible without ever being completely definitive. One witness Knight interviews urges, “The past is the past, just let it go,” and she has a point, speaking as someone likely being retraumatized by reiterating tragic events from more than 50 years ago. But letting go of the pursuit of truth just doesn’t seem like a viable option in this case.
