‘The Stringer’: Iconic photo, edited credit

What does one do when faced with erasure? That’s the question ‘The Stringer’ pursues as it attempts to trace the origins of an iconic Vietnam War photograph.

Nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc, better known as the “Napalm Girl”, was captured running from a Skyraider bombing in Trang Bang on a 50mm Pentax. Naked, arms outstretched and a face covered in agony, she became synonymous with pain that war can inflict.

Associated Press (AP) staffer Nick Ut, credited with taking the 1972 photograph, earned a Pulitzer, a World Press Photo of the Year and repute.

Cut to the 2020s. Carl Robinson, the editor who wrote the original caption and credit at AP’s Saigon bureau, emails photographer Gary Knight with a provocative claim: an unnamed stringer, not Ut, may have taken the photograph.

Across its 1-hour, 43-minute runtime, the documentary presents three major arguments — each compelling to varying degrees — to support the claimed truth. Robinson’s word is the first. The camera follows Knight and his team through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, trying to identify the man whose name the editor could not recall. “He wasn’t a part of our regular army of stringers,” Robinson says, before asserting that celebrated AP photographer Horst Faas, the man calling the shots at the bureau, asked him to put down Ut’s name in the credit: “‘Make it staff’ were Faas’ exact words.”

It is gripping to watch the crew piece together fragments of memory from photographs and interviews. They run into dead ends, even threats to their theories and reputations. These early sequences are where the documentary is at its best, both journalistically and technically. The investigative rigour put into finding an unnamed man in a city of 10 million, a country of 103 million, is infectious. The taut pace, heightened score and slick camerawork furthers the tension.

Unfortunately, when the search for the stringer culminates into the discovery of Nguyen Thanh Nghe less than an hour into the film, the vigour wanes. The tone shifts as Nghe, now in his nineties and settled in California, offers his testimony, which is the film’s second argument. The stringer says he sold his camera film from the day at the AP office for the standard $20. He even claims to have received a print of the “Napalm Girl” in return.

What follows is the emotional core. Nghe’s recollections — echoed by his family and colleagues — paint a life marked by a deep sense of loss. A loss of ownership, the only luxury a stringer could afford.

The anecdotes tug at the heart but don’t offer definitive answers. The print that could have served as proof of authorship is gone; as Nghe recounts, his wife tore it up, horrified by the image itself.

Despite being approached, Ut never appears in the film. That’s possibly why the crew, conceptually, seemed convinced that he was not the man behind the camera right from the start. For them, it is often not a question of ‘who’, but ‘how’? Which leads us to their third argument: the forensics.

A Paris-based lab dissects photographs and archival footage. They use 3D reconstructions to ascertain angles and distance, positing that Ut was likely not in a position to take the photograph. But they don’t decisively rule it out either.

By the time the final frame rolls, it’s an information overflow. Between archival footage, back-and-forth interviews of journalists, insiders, Phuc and Ngeh’s families, the tonal shifts don’t always work. Using the three central cities to wrap up each argument could have resulted in a neater structure.

To its credit though, ‘The Stringer’ doesn’t necessarily impose. It leaves a sliver of doubt even in its findings. More importantly, it asks searing questions about the treatment of off-the-street hires in Vietnam and across the globe.

Stringers, like the nine-year-old Phuc, were people whose lives were shaped by war. The film reminds us that erasing their names, be it from the “Napalm Girl” photograph or any other, would be a quiet erasure of history itself.