Nick Ut

Huỳnh Công Út, known professionally as Nick Ut (born March 29, 1951), is a Vietnamese-American photographer who worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles. He won both the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and the 1973 World Press Photo of the Year for his 1972 photograph The Terror of War, depicting children running away from a napalm bombing attack during the Vietnam War. In 2017, he retired. Examples of his work may be found in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

Biography

Born in Long An, Vietnam (then part of French Indochina), Ut began to take photographs for the Associated Press when he was 15, just after his older brother Huynh Thanh My, another AP photographer, was killed in Vietnam. His closest friend in the Saigon bureau, Henri Huet, also died in 1971 after volunteering to take the weary Ut's place on an assignment.

After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Ut himself was wounded three different times in the war in his knee, arm, and stomach. He moved to Tokyo and arrived in Los Angeles two years later.

The Terror of War

The Terror of War, also colloquially called Napalm Girl, is Ut's best-known photograph and features a naked 9-year-old girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, running toward the camera from a South Vietnamese napalm strike that mistakenly hit Trảng Bàng village instead of nearby North Vietnamese troops on June 8, 1972. Before delivering his film with the photograph, Ut set his camera aside to rush 9-year-old Kim Phuc to a hospital, where doctors saved her life. He said: "I cried when I saw her running... If I don’t help her, if something happened and she died, I think I’d kill myself after that".

The publication of the photograph was delayed due to the AP bureau's debate about transmitting a naked girl's photograph over the wire.

Audiotapes of then-president Richard Nixon in conversation with his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, show that Nixon doubted the veracity of the photograph, musing whether it may have been "fixed".

In September 2016, a Norway newspaper published an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg after censorship was imposed on this photograph placed on the newspaper's Facebook page. Half of the ministers in the Norwegian government shared the photograph on their Facebook pages, among them prime minister Erna Solberg from the Conservative Party. Several of the Facebook posts, including the Prime Minister's post, were deleted by Facebook, but later that day, Facebook reinstated the picture and said "the value of permitting sharing outweighs the value of protecting the community by removal".

A 2025 documentary, The Stringer investigates the authorship of the photo and claims that it was not taken by Ut but by a Vietnamese photographer named Nguyễn Thành Nghệ. Ut and Associated Press both refute the claim.

Family and later career

Ut is a United States citizen and is married with two children in Los Angeles. His photos of a crying Paris Hilton in the back seat of a Los Angeles County Sheriff's cruiser on June 8, 2007, were published worldwide; however, Ut was photographing Hilton alongside photographer Karl Larsen. Two photographs emerged; the more famous photograph of Hilton was credited to Ut despite being Larsen's photo.

After working for the Associated Press for 51 years, Ut retired in 2017. The photography community in Los Angeles held a retirement party to celebrate Ut's career and exhibit his work (including that iconic Pulitzer Prize-winning photo) at The Perfect Exposure Gallery in Los Angeles.

In 2021, Nick Ut was awarded the National Medal of Arts for his work during the Vietnam War. On the eve of receiving the award, Ut published an essay in Newsweek explaining why he decided to accept the medal from President Donald Trump despite political concerns surrounding the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The next day, while out to dinner with a friend, Nick Ut was attacked by a stranger in downtown Washington, D.C.. He fell to the ground, hit the metal fence surrounding the tree, and hurt his ribs, back, and leg. It is unclear whether this attack was for political reasons or just coincidental. After the incident, Ut received many calls asking about his health, including from Kim Phuc.

Accolades

Nick Ut's iconic photograph, The Terror of War, won every major photographic award, such as the Overseas Press Club honoring him with the Best Photograph, Daily Newspaper or Wire Service. The George Polk Awards for News Photography, the World Press Photo for Photo of the Year, and the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography. He was the 2014 Lucie Awards honoree for Achievement in Photojournalism. Kerala Media Academy in India presented him with the World Press Photographer Prize in 2019.

On the 40th anniversary of that Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph in September 2012, Ut became only the third person inducted into the Leica Hall of Fame for his contributions to photojournalism. In 2021, he became the first journalist to receive the National Medal of Arts, the highest award given to artists and arts patrons by the United States federal governments.