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.[4]
On March 29, 2017, he retired from the AP.[5] On January 13, 2021, Ut 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 government.
Biography
Born in Long An, Vietnam (then part of the French Indochina), Ut began to take photographs for the Associated Press when he was 16, just after his older brother Huynh Thanh My, another AP photographer, was killed in Vietnam. Ut himself was wounded three different times in the war in his knee, arm, and stomach. Ut has since worked for the Associated Press in Tokyo, South Korea, and Hanoi.
The Terror of War
The Terror of War by Nick Ut
The Terror of War, also colloquially called Napalm Girl,[6] is Ut's best-known photograph and features a naked 9-year-old girl, Phan Thị Kim Phúc, 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.[7]
Before delivering his film with the photograph, Ut took Kim Phúc to the hospital. The publication of the photograph was delayed due to the AP bureau's debate about transmitting a naked girl's photograph over the wire:
... an editor at the AP rejected the photo of Kim Phuc running down the road without clothing because it showed frontal nudity. Pictures of nudes of all ages and sexes, and especially frontal views were an absolute no-no at the Associated Press in 1972 ... Horst argued by telex with the New York head-office that an exception must be made, with the compromise that no close-up of the girl Kim Phuc alone would be transmitted. The New York photo editor, Hal Buell, agreed that the news value of the photograph overrode any reservations about nudity.
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".[9]
Ut still maintains contact with Kim Phúc, who now resides in Ajax, Ontario, Canada.
In September 2016,[10] a Norway newspaper published an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg after censorship was imposed on this photograph placed on the newspaper's Facebook page.[11] 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,[12] but later that day, Facebook decided to allow the photo.[13]
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.[14]
Awards
1972: The George Polk Awards for News Photography: Huynh Cong Ut, Associated Press, for depicting a girl who had torn off her burned clothing and was fleeing a Vietnam napalm strike.[15]
1973: Pulitzer Prize Winner in Spot News Photography, Huynh Cong Ut, of Associated Press, For his photograph, The Terror of War, depicting children in flight from a napalm bombing[16]
2014: The Lucie Awards: 2014 Honoree: Achievement in Photojournalism, Nick Ut[17]
2019: World Press Photographer Prize, IPPFK, Kerala Media Academy, India.[18] The award consists of a citation and a purse of Rs. 1 lakh.[19]
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