Photograph by Nick Ut, Associated Press (AP). Original caption written by Carl Robinson, June 8, 1972.
Truth Was There.
Yesterday, I read Dave Burnett’s opinion piece published in The Washington Post and later the full text he shared on his Facebook page. In it, Dave was generous in praising essays I wrote about the new Netflix documentary The Stringer, which centers on claims by a former Associated Press editor in Saigon during the Vietnam War that he changed the credit of the photograph “The Terror of War” from the photographer Nguyễn Thành Nghệ to Nick Ut.
Being mentioned by Dave moved me deeply, not simply because of the praise itself, or because he mentioned my name, but above all because someone like Dave Burnett, who was there and lived that moment, read something I wrote and recognized in it a meaningful contribution to the debate we are having. That means a great deal to me.
After days of thinking about this problem, I have watched the film several times and continue to revisit it for reference whenever I write. More importantly, after witnessing troubling examples of the film’s influence on people with a poor understanding of the issue — such as a photographer who wrote, “And the person best suited to know who took the photograph was silent for 50 years while enjoying all the benefits from a work he did not do…” — I felt compelled to intervene.
That statement suggests that Nick spent fifty years benefiting from the credit of a photograph he supposedly never made. This is not only a profound misreading of the historical context, but also a distortion of what the documentary itself actually presents. Faced with how easily the film can be weaponized into moral certainty, I felt the need to look for a way out of this quagmire.
At its core, what the documentary ultimately confronts us with is a simple and brutal question: who is lying?
I may not know who is lying, but I am certain about who is telling the truth.
Dave, Nick, and Nguyễn Thành Nghệ are all telling the truth.
Let me explaim:
They are all telling the truth not because their accounts align perfectly, nor because they are free from contradiction, but because the kind of truth they offer is grounded in lived experience. Epistemologically, their testimonies derive authority not from documentary neatness or retrospective coherence, but from presence. They were there.
When Dave recounts his experience of that day, I am certain he is telling the truth. He does not speak from inference or speculation, but from direct perception. He lived it. He saw it, witnessed it, and felt it. The consequences of that day, of that place and those people, became constitutive of who he is. His present effort to defend Nick is not a strategic position; it is a continuity of experience. In epistemic terms, Dave’s testimony carries the weight of embodied knowledge: knowledge that precedes interpretation and survives doubt.
I have no doubt that Nick is telling the truth. Nick was there. He took photographs. He made photographs in that moment. When he says he made that image, there is no reasonable epistemic basis to discredit him. In situations of extreme contingency, war, chaos, urgency, authorship is not retained as a mental inventory of frames but as an act embedded in flow. To expect perfect recall, technical certainty, or later verification is to impose a digital epistemology on an analog reality. Nick’s claim rests on first-order knowledge: action performed, not hypothesis constructed.
I am equally certain that Nguyễn Thành Nghệ is not lying. Like Dave and Nick, he was there. He witnessed it, lived it, felt it, and carried the marks of that moment forward in his life. His testimony is not an argument; it is a trace. Trauma, after all, is not a failure of memory but a form of memory that resists rational ordering. From an epistemological standpoint, this does not weaken his account, it situates it precisely where truth often resides in contexts of violence: fragmented, affective, and deeply embodied.
Nor do I have any reason to distrust Nghệ’s account of the photograph being placed on the refrigerator and later destroyed by his wife. Any image made that day would inevitably carry the unbearable substance of that moment: a burned child, forced nudity, violence, war. This is not conjecture, but structure, the underlying conditions that make certain images inevitable in that place and time. Cameras recorded them; photographers organized them into frames.
Such images cannot be neutral, nor can they be domestic. To place one in a kitchen, to expose it to children, to everyday life, is to collapse the fragile boundary between survival and horror. Nghệ’s wife’s decision to destroy a photograph carrying those elements was therefore not an act of casual impulsiveness, but an act of protection.
Epistemologically, it reminds us that not all truth seeks preservation. Some truths are too close to the body, too intimate with pain, to be archived at all; they must be forgotten, or at least entrusted to those who can live at a necessary distance from them. The door of a refrigerator is not the right place. For this reason, I believe Nghệ’s wife could indeed have destroyed the photograph.
What these three men offer is not a contradiction of facts, but a convergence of experiential truths. To doubt them collectively is not skepticism, it is a refusal to accept that knowledge can emerge from lived proximity to violence. And that refusal says more about the observer than about those who were there.
It is necessary to remember: Nick, Nghệ and his family, did not choose to be in Vietnam. They were from Vietnam. That war was their history unfolding before their own eyes. The others, Carl, Dave, and so many more, were there because they chose to be there for different reasons, all legitimate in their own way. I know this. I spent twenty years of my life covering wars. I know what drives a photographer to take risks. I know the ethical value that can exist behind that choice.
For these reasons, I am convinced that Nick, Nghệ, and Dave are not lying.
What remains, then, are a few figures who run a real risk of having lied.
The first is Horst Faas. Unfortunately, he is now accused of having been the catalyst of a cascade of consequences and is no longer here to defend himself. I never spoke with him. I saw him only once, briefly, in Perpignan, already in a wheelchair, and did not have the courage to approach him. Accusing someone who is absent and unable to respond is, in itself, a serious ethical problem. Still, if he did in fact create the problems we are debating today, it is legitimate to try to correct it.
Then there is Carl Robinson. His claims must be assessed according to a simple standard: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Carl provides none. Much of what he writes and says is inconsistent and, at times, appears driven by bad faith. He cannot expect his assertions to be received with standing ovations at film festivals. If he truly cares about the truth, if he genuinely stands by his claims, he must be prepared to defend them publicly and rigorously. A man nearing the end of his life should not carry a reputation clouded by unresolved mistrust into the grave.
Finally, there is Gary Knight. Even if he sincerely believes in the hypothesis put forward by Carl and is convinced that he is correcting a historical error, we now know that Gary was not truthful. He was disloyal both to Nick, to Dave Burnett and to the very narrative he claims to defend. But why? This must be addressed clearly.
When did he first become aware of Carl’s hypothesis? Why did he choose to frame the documentary as though this were the first time he had encountered it? These questions matter. They matter because this documentary, in my view, draws a clear line between what our work as documentarians and journalists, engaged with the reality produced by human collective actions, has been, and what it now risks becoming.
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Documentaries obey a dramatic curve, built on tension between what is presented as possible and what is framed as impossible, between good and evil. The goal is to capture the audience through this narrative device. There is nothing inherently wrong with this when we are in a cinema, a theater, or watching a Netflix film at home. In art and fiction, this tension is productive precisely because it is openly acknowledged as a construction. Ambiguity becomes a space for reflection, not a substitute for proof.
The problem arises when the same dramatic mechanisms are applied to reality produced by human collective actions. In that case, tension no longer invites thought but risks producing conviction without responsibility, shaping not only the lives of real people, but also how we come to understand history itself.
There are events that rupture form even before they rupture life. Faced with extreme violence, Auschwitz, Vietnam, Gaza, Ukraine and other geographies of trauma, fiction proves insufficient, classical documentary proves insufficient, and language itself reveals its fragility. It is at this point of collapse that the idea of super or supra fiction emerges: a form that is no longer fiction and no longer documentary, because both fail when confronted with the unrepresentable.
This transformation does not arise solely from the brutality of reality; increasingly, it is driven by market pressures.
Today, so-called “non-fiction” narratives must adapt to the demands of platforms: dramatic structures, narrative arcs, cliffhangers, and rhythms designed for retention and consumption. Creators are pushed to mold reality until it becomes financeable, distributable, and acceptable. Often, one must mutilate what one understands as documentary in order to fit the required format.
There are also clear limits on what can be shown. Certain images cannot circulate; certain bodies cannot appear; certain testimonies are not tolerated. Direct brutality is refused. This forces the creation of mediations, indirect forms, stylized approaches, narratives that grant partial access to horror without exposing it fully. It is in this interval, between an unbearable reality and a market that domesticates it, that super fiction takes shape.
Super fiction does not invent the fact; it reorganizes the real to make it communicable. It is not a lie, but an attempt to preserve truth when literalness would destroy it. If one is absolutely faithful to the event, the work will not circulate; if one is absolutely faithful to the market, the event disappears. Super fiction emerges as a gesture of narrative survival between these two impossibilities.
The Stringer is a clear example of a super-fiction deformity, one that ultimately obeys not truth, but the market.
When, on that day in the late afternoon of June 8, 1972, at the AP Saigon bureau, Carl supposedly complied with Horst’s order to change the credit of the frame the world now knows as The Terror of War, it is difficult to believe that, assuming his hypothesis is correct, he did not understand that this decision would endanger not only Nghệ’s life, but Nick’s as well.
After all, as Carl himself describes, only he and Horst Faas were in that room when, supposedly, Horst asked him to change the photo credit. As Nghệ, Nick had absolutely nothing to do with this. Nor Nghệ, nor Nick or anyone else were present. Nick never had any reason to doubt whether the image had been made with a Nikon, a Pentax, or a Leica. Horst told him it had been made with a Leica, and that was enough.
Anyone who has photographed on film knows this. Once the photograph is taken, you do not know exactly what you have captured. We are not talking about digital photography, where you shoot, check, and repeat within seconds. In dynamic situations like that one, photographed on film, unpredictability is a constant. You photograph and move on. Only later, much later, do you discover what you actually managed to capture…if you did capture anything.
Carl, therefore, should have known that his actions would affect two lives, not just one. That is why it sounds strange that, at this moment, he shows concern only about making amends with Nghệ. He must equally make amends with Nick.
And there is a question that remains unanswered: if Carl spent decades searching for Nghệ, why did he never speak with Nick? Someone he knew, someone to whom he had direct access? He could have done so simply and respectfully. He could have said: “Nick, I have something extremely serious to tell you. Something that only I know. That day, Horst Faas demanded that I change the photo credit to your name. I was wrong. I apologize.”
None of this was done.
Instead, a narrative of moral confrontation was constructed, an artificial tension between good and evil. But this tension does not exist in the reality of the facts. It exists in Carl’s mind. It exists in Gary’s mind. It exists in Netflix’s economic interests. And it exists in all those who carry an angry need to point fingers, to choose sides, to confirm for themselves a sense of moral elevation: “I stood on the side of good, therefore I am morally superior” ,even when that posture is shaped by artificial dramatic arcs molded by corporate interests.
But we are not talking about simplistic dichotomies, about black and white. We are talking about history. World history. We are talking about the lives of real people who existed and exist, who lived extraordinary trajectories, and who now see their names stained by accusations that cannot be proven and that increasingly appear to be driven by interests and bad intentions.
In light of this, my suggestion is simple:
Since Carl and Gary agreed to submit the case to a forensic analysis that, in the end, proves absolutely nothing, it only amplifies doubt, anger, and prejudice, they should also submit themselves to a lie detector. If there is anyone who may be lying at this moment, it is only the two of them.
To Carl: On June 8, 1972, did Horst Faas explicitly instruct you to change the photo caption credit for the photograph later known as The Terror of War? Yes or no.
To Gary: Did you first become aware of Carl Robinson’s hypothesis regarding the authorship of The Terror of War photograph in December 2022? Yes or no.
And even if their hypotheses were considered true, this still would not prove that the specific frame we are discussing was made by Nghệ, by Nick, or by any other photographer present at that instant.
The most dignified solution, for everyone involved, for those who lived that moment, and for history itself, would be co-authorship of the image. Nick could have made it. Nghệ could have made it. Another military photographer present could also have made it.
After all, what is the problem with admitting that a historical photograph may have more than one author?
This does not change the historical fact. It does not remove Nick’s credibility. It does not artificially “clean” Nghệ’s image, now portrayed as a possible charlatan. The fact that Nghệ did not pursue a career as a photographer does not invalidate the possibility that he made that image. Chance exists. And in the context of war, it is almost a rule.
If there is a next ethical step to be taken, it lies in questioning the accuser, not those who lived, saw, and carried the consequences of that day.
