The Terror of War, commonly known as “Napalm Girl”, is one of the most enduring and influential images of the 20th century.

Captured on June 8 1972, the photograph shows nine-year-old Kim Phúc running naked toward a camera. She has her arms outstretched, and is flanked by other children screaming in terror after a napalm strike on their village during the Vietnam War.

For five decades, the photo has been credited to Nick Út, a then 21-year old Vietnamese photographer working for the Associated Press (AP) in Saigon.

The image earned Út the Pulitzer Prize and World Press Photo of the Year in 1973, and the National Medal of Arts (America’s highest honour for artists) in 2021.

His account of the moment – how he photographed Phúc, then rushed her to hospital to save her life – has become inseparable from the photo’s legacy. But a new documentary calls this narrative into question.

Recently released on Netflix, The Stringer is directed by Bao Nguyen and narrated by photojournalist Gary Knight. It claims the iconic image was actually taken by a local freelance photographer – a “stringer” – paid just US$20 by the AP and given a print of the photo, before his contribution was erased from history.

If true, Napalm Girl becomes not only a damning indictment of war’s brutality, but also of the systematic exploitation of non-Western journalists by Western media organisations – a pattern that persists today.

The Vietnam War, dubbed the

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