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  • David Burnett talks about “The Stringer” and what he saw in Trang Bang when Nick Ut took the famous “Napalm Girl” image – A Photo Editor


    For those who haven’t been following the major rift in the world of photojournalism a quick summary of what is going on: A film called “The Stringer” directed by Bao Nguyen (previously directed The Greatest Night In Pop) and produced/starring Gary Knight (VII Agency co-founder and ED) premiered at The Sundance Film Festival on January 25 claiming and attempting to prove that 53 years ago Nguyễn Thành Nghệ actually took “The Terror of War”  (AKA Napalm Girl) image and not Nick Ut. AP photo editor Carl Robinson claims his boss, Horst Fass, told him to switch the credit from Nguyễn, a stringer, to Nick, an AP photographer. The filmmakers find Nguyễn, and he says, yes, he took the picture.

    Prior to the film’s premiere, the AP released a preliminary report disputing the claims of the film. At the premiere, the AP watched the film and followed up (May 16) with a 100-page report saying that there’s not enough evidence to remove Nick Ut’s credit.

    Then, on May 16, World Press Photo released a statement saying they investigated (David disputes the characterization that they investigated and rather they simply got a private screening of the film and agreed with the conclusion) and are suspending Nick Ut’s credit on his 1973 Photo of the Year award.

    This sparked outrage on social media with posts from what appears to me to be the VII camp (Ashley Gilbertson, Ed Kashi, Sara Terry) and the Nick Ut camp (David Burnett, Pete Souza, David Kennerly).

    And the real zinger in the whole dust-up is that David Burnett was there! He’s an eyewitness to the events at Trang Bang, where the famous image was made.

    Ok, one final note: besides the premiere at Sundance and private screenings, the film cannot be watched until a distributor is lined up. I’m aware of a screening in DC next month, but most people, including David and myself, have not seen the film.

    I talked with David over the phone, and here’s a condensed and edited version of our conversation.

     

    Screenshot from AP Report: Investigating claims around ‘The Terror of War’ photograph
    Screenshot from AP Report: Investigating claims around ‘The Terror of War’ photograph
    Screenshot from AP Report: Investigating claims around ‘The Terror of War’ photograph
    Screenshot from AP Report: Investigating claims around ‘The Terror of War’ photograph

    Rob Haggart: I want to start by asking if it’s really difficult for you to go back and rehash all this stuff.

    David Burnett: No, I mean, I have these moments from not just Vietnam, but the jobs that I worked my whole life, French elections, Ethiopia, Chile, and it’s not really something that causes me great pain. There are so many of these things that I’ve lived through that the memories of them and what I was doing in them as a photographer is very, very clear in my head. And Trang Bang is really no different than almost anything else.

    The first time I was under fire and had the crap scared out of me, it’s one of those things where you don’t just think, will I ever get over it? Because you don’t, they become part of what your life is about.

    The running joke about Trang Bang and me was that, well, I missed the shot because I was changing film in my old screw mount knob wind Leica which is kind of a slow, kludgy film camera. It was not an easy camera to operate.

    And yet, Cartier-Bresson shot with them for something like 20 years before the M2 and the M3 came along and made some pretty great pictures, so I mean, I think part of why I even bothered shooting with that camera instead of getting another M2 for 200 bucks, was kind of a historical thing with the old Contax and Leicas, you felt a little more attached to some kind history if you’re shooting with this kludgy old camera and um you know, and I was trying to reload it and anybody had ever owned one of the cameras knows that if you take a 35-millimeter film where you have the little cut-down tongue that you really need to cut an extra inch or inch and a half away from that one side that’s cut so that when you drop the film in the camera, it will seat itself perfectly.

    I never bothered doing that, so I was always stumbling, trying to get the camera reloaded. So I was reloading it when the plane came in to drop the napalm. I was holding the open camera in my left hand and shooting with a 105 in the other hand. When the napalm hit right next to the pagoda, there was this Gigundo fucking fireball, Nick has that picture, and I kind of have it a few seconds later. But it was the in the days when you didn’t shoot with three motor drives, you know, you weren’t going out there to shoot 25 rolls of film. I think I shot maybe three or four rolls that day, and it was a fairly long period of time we were there because we were kind of hanging out waiting to see what was going on.

    You could hear firing and shooting coming from the village. Then the planes came in, and there was that fireball, and then like three minutes later, the kids started running out of the field and onto the road toward us, and that is the moment, more than anything in my mind, where Nick was the one guy who was in a position to shoot the picture, and nobody else was. There was this line of journalists, and we were all within a few feet of each other lined up across the road. As soon as we could tell that, there were people on the road racing out toward us, and the kids were running as fast as they could run. Nick and this guy Alex Shimkin, who was killed a few weeks later up north, took off running towards them, and no one else did.

    RH: When did you first hear a film was being made about this event and that there were questions about the author of the famous image?

    I was sitting at a Walgreens parking lot in Florida 3 years ago going in to go get some stuff, and Gary Knight called me and said tell me everything you know about Trang Bang, so I spent a couple hours on the phone and told him everything I know and then said you know there’s this guy and he’s kind of a horses ass, ex AP guy and he says that Nick didn’t shoot the picture and I kind of think he’s full of crap as does everyone else but along the way you’re gonna run into Carl Robinson.

    Carl had this real chip on his shoulder about AP, and he was never afraid to let people know how he felt like he’d been screwed over by the AP.

    RH: So you’re telling me this rumor has been around for a while?

    Yep, a long time. It’s not new. The last time I saw Horst Faas was in 2008. There was a gathering for a memorial wall at the news museum in Washington, and if you lived near the East Coast and worked as a journalist in Vietnam, you pretty much were there that day. Somebody at that point could have said, hey, Horst, let me talk to you about this thing that Carl’s been telling everybody that you told him to put Nick’s name on the image, and it was really some stringer’s film.

    And no one ever, no one ever asked Horst.

    No one ever just asked him point blank.

    I guess Carl makes a pretty reasonable case for trying to talk about how the guilt of 50 years and being able to unburden his guilt when he finally met this guy. But you know, every crackpot theory that ever was has at least a 2% chance that it happened.

    Could Horst have said it? I suppose he could have. But it would have been very out of line with what always happened.

    If you talk to Neal Ulevich, who was in the AP bureau as a staff photographer for, I don’t know, six or seven years in Asia and was in the bureau the whole time, he will tell you about the sacrosanct policy of never allowing anyone’s film to have any name on it other than the actual photographer that shot it.

    He said, “All the time I was in Asia, never once did I see anybody do anything like that.”

    It just didn’t happen.

    I was in that group of people who were looking at the first print of Napalm Girl when it came out of the darkroom, and I did what every photographer in the history of photography would have done, which is I look at this picture and I try and think to myself without having seen my own film, hm, I wonder if I have anything better. I’m thinking, yeah, that’s pretty good. That’s probably better than anything I have.

    There were 3 or 4 of us looking at this little 5 x 7 print that was still wet, and Horst, without making a big deal out of it, just turned to Nick and said, “You do good work today, Nick Ut.”

    I still have the memo I wrote when I went back to my office at the Time-Life Bureau. I said there was this accidental bombing in this village called Trang Bang, and I said, Nick from AP got a pretty good picture, and they tell me they’re shipping the negative to New York on what’ll be the same flight that my negatives are gonna be on, so you’ll be able to get an original print made in the lab rather than rely on a wire service photo.

    So that’s what they ended up doing. It was in the front section of the magazine called the Beat of Life; there were always 3 or 4 of these big picture spreads.

    Usually one picture, sometimes two or even three, and they ran one of mine of the grandma with the burned baby and Nick’s picture side by side, and when you look in the photo credits, it says page four and five, David Burnett, AP. I mean, it was the wire services in the 70s. They weren’t going to put a photographer’s name on it. It’s kind of funny that way.

    RH: What are the chances, if you’re Nick, that you don’t know beforehand you made that picture?

    There’s no way that either of those guys would not know they took that picture. It was such an enpassant moment, and I’m sure there was just one frame that was the one.

    For sure, there are times when you’re surprised by something you’ve done when you move from wherever you shot it, and now, you know, we’ve kind of shut out the middle man, and you go right to the computer and see if what’s on there is anything like what you remember, but in the film days I would find it really hard to not know that you had something.

    I can’t imagine that the camera wasn’t up at the eye; it’s not like a chest-high Hail Mary, although technically, it was never great, but maybe at the same time, some of the imperfections add to the raw reality of that moment.

    RH: That leads me to this talking point I see from the film’s defenders saying that this is not a critique of Nick, but that would mean that Nick didn’t know he took the photo. But you think there’s no way he didn’t know he took the photo, so the film is saying he’s been lying for 53 years about this.

    He’s a 21-year-old kid with a camera, and I think incapable of that. Yes, it was a good picture, but there were a lot of good pictures out there.

    And, you know, some people have said, oh, but Horst knew right away that that was gonna be a great picture, and he wanted AP to have the copyright on it instead of a stringer. But the thing is, you’ve got all these little sub-arguments if you accept a certain premise, and you can walk yourself right off a cliff of trying to figure out what it is you believe or don’t believe.

    Gary called me back at one point, and he said, you know, I think there’s really something to Carl’s statement here, but you know, once you get the first bit of the Kool-Aid, you just gotta drink the whole pitcher, and I just don’t see it.

    I mean, like I said, it’s possible.

    Everything’s possible, you know?

    I mean, you know, once you start to believe part of it, you kind of end up believing the whole thing, or you believe none of it.

    To me, it looks like Gary’s trying to make himself into a big documentary producer, and this is his launch pad.

    Gary said you ought to be in the film, and I just said, Gary, I don’t wanna do a goddam Mike Wallace interview where I have no control over how you cut it or anything else. I’ve watched 60 minutes too many times where Mike managed to hammer somebody, and I had no confidence that it would be a fair representation.

    Fox Butterfield was the reporter I was with that day working for The New York Times, and he got a call from Gary’s wife, a producer on the film, he started to tell her his version of what took place, and she told him everything you’ve said is wrong. That’s not a really good way to coax people into a discussion. She said he would have to sign a non-disclosure agreement, and he said, what the hell for? I’m the one telling you stuff; you haven’t told me anything.

    Gary said to me last time I talked to him like six weeks ago, he said, well, you know, we’ve done all this forensic stuff, and we’ve proven that he couldn’t be down there to take the picture.

    And I said to him, in my mind, because I remember the way he ran out on the road ahead of everybody else when the kids were coming down the road, he’s the only one who could have taken that picture because it was in the very first moments that the kids were coming down toward where the journalists were lined up, and it was after that everybody else started wandering around, but that was another five or ten or 15 minutes later.

    And I just don’t see how anybody else was out there in front, and to me, that picture was taken out in front. It wasn’t taken right next to the press people.

    It was out there away, maybe, I don’t know, 20 yards, 40 yards. 50 yards.

    RH: How do you think the filmmakers should have handled this? What should they have done with the information they got from Carl?

    You don’t ever want to get to a place where people are afraid to posit things, but I don’t know what the answer is, but you know, unlike a lot of people who don’t shut up about it, I’m not sure I have an answer to what the most perplexing question is.

    And I never said I was right behind him when he shot that.

    I saw him, I was changing my film, and it was a minute or two minutes later, and in those moments, that could be a long time. I offer it strictly as a witness to what happened that day and nothing more.

    I find one of the most curious things of all, aware of the fact that Nguyễn probably had to leave Saigon with almost nothing, that he left everything behind, and  I totally get that.

    But apparently, he never sold another picture to anybody, and in the last 50 years, no one has even seen one picture that he’s taken.

    Other than the most famous picture of the Vietnam War.

    That is a really weird leap of faith.





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  • The Daily Edit – Sacha Stejko talks about balancing vulnerability and power infront of and behind the lens – A Photo Editor


    Photographer: Sacha Stejko

    I had the pleasure of serving on the 2025 Communication Arts Photography Competition jury—a fantastic opportunity to step outside my usual discipline and review photography alongside my esteemed peers. One standout moment was discovering Sacha Stej Sacha, an Auckland-based photographer represented by Image Driven Content. Her accolades include being named one of the top 200 advertising photographers globally by Lürzer’s Archive and being recognized as one of the 23 World’s Best Sport Photographers by The Agents Club in 2023. I recently had the pleasure of catching up with Sacha to discuss her award-winning image.

    Your photography is known for its cinematic and powerful portrayal of women—what are the key elements you look for when capturing intensity and resilience in your subjects?
    When I’m gearing up to capture my subjects, there are a few key elements I always keep in mind. First and foremost, getting to know my subjects is essential. I want to know what shapes who they are. Before the shoot and even during it, I dive into conversations that reveal what makes them tick.

    Once I have a sense of them, I try matching their emotional tone; if they’re fiery and passionate, I want that to jump off the frame. I aim to include a piece of who they are in every shot, whether it’s a glimmer in their eye or the way they hold themselves. I strive to create an image they can recognize, one that resonates with their energy. It’s all about connection, and that’s what I love most about photography: being able to freeze a slice of someone’s narrative, a moment of resilience and intensity, in time.

    In your “Girls in Sports” campaign for 2 Degrees, you highlighted both strength and vulnerability in your subject. Can you talk about how the casting went and what direction you gave?
    This campaign was shot alongside a TVC, and the fantastic Director Taylor Ferguson did the casting. When I met these young women I could see that they radiated talent and spirit. For this brief, I wanted to capture that passion and grit. They don’t just play the game—they own it. I love the dichotomy between their sweet appearances and the fierce determination they display on the field – there is nothing more badass than seeing these girls in their element. Take the rugby girl, for instance. I asked her to sprint full speed towards the camera, like she was dodging the opposing team. In that moment, she transformed into a powerhouse charging at me like a freight train, the fire in her belly blazing as she zoomed closer. It was exactly the energy we were after.

    How do you balance storytelling with advocacy in your visual work, particularly around gender representation?
    Women in sports face a harsh reality—they often get overshadowed, and it’s disheartening to see that women’s sports internationally don’t get the same spotlight as men’s. That’s why campaigns like this are so crucial; encouraging fans—especially from a young age—to rally behind these amazing athletes.

    In my visual work, I find that storytelling and advocacy naturally go hand in hand—probably without me even realizing it. As a woman photographer, I’m drawn to capturing fierce, strong women because I know just how powerful we can be. In a society that often tries to box us in or undermine our strength, it’s crucial to keep that fire alive. That passion burns even brighter as a mother to a spirited young daughter. I want her to see women as capable and unafraid, sensitive and kind, just like the women I photograph.

    How do you ensure your images challenge traditional portrayals, particularly of femininity and athleticism, while still maintaining authenticity and emotional depth?
    I’m usually guided by how I want the image to feel, especially when it comes to capturing femininity and athleticism. My images become a deep dive into an energy that connects the viewer to the subject. I want to create an atmosphere where the audience feels confronted, pulled into the frame, and unable to look away.

    I find authenticity through genuine human connections, digging beyond the surface, whether I’m photographing a seasoned athlete or someone new to the sport. There’s something superhuman about athletes; they possess more than just physical strength; they embody resilience and discipline. There’s a profound sacrifice that comes with striving for excellence, and that narrative fascinates me. Each image I capture is a testament to that journey—an exploration of what it truly means to balance vulnerability and power.

    Can you talk about the role visual media plays in shifting public perception and promoting equity, especially in underrepresented communities and activist movements? 
    Photography holds a unique power in shaping public perception and promoting equity. As a visual person myself, I’ve always felt that a single image can convey emotions and stories far more effectively than words ever could. It’s the raw authenticity of a photograph that can resonate with someone’s heart, breaking down barriers and connecting us all on a fundamental level.

    Through the lens of a camera, we can reveal the complexities of human nature and amplify voices that often go unheard. In this visual storytelling landscape, images become tools for change, not just documenting reality but actively reshaping how we view each other. Ultimately, photography fosters a shared humanity that can inspire action and fight against injustice. They remind us that, at our core, we are all just humans with similar desires for love, acceptance, and dignity.





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  • The Daily Edit – Aidan Klimenko talks about “wins” or “successes” stemming from work personal – A Photo Editor



    Heidi: Your work has an impressive range – it would be hard to categorize. You mentioned your work asks questions. What questions you thinking about in your recent personal work.
    Aidan: I’ve always been drawn to photography because I’ve seen it as an access point to the world. A license to ask, to look, and to learn. Sometimes I find answers, but most often I just find more questions. With this current work that I’m making while in grad school, I’m taking my interest in landscape—an interest that’s been fostered in objectively beautiful places like Antarctica, the Amazon, and Patagonia—and applying it to the contemporary urban, corporate, and residential environments of Los Angeles.
    The questions that I’m finding myself thinking about while I walk around and photograph stem from my personal experience of moving to a big city for the first time after years spent living on the road, mostly outside in nature. LA is bizarre and layered. It’s a mix of so many things without really having a centralized, defined identity. And it’s home to a lot of this American obsession with concrete, stucco, and bright colored walls that I’ve been finding myself interested in using as elements to question our relationship with this environment we’ve built and surrounded ourselves with. I’m using this time in school to learn about creating work that provides space for the viewer to have their own relationship with the images—space to ask their own questions instead of making images that are limited by the answers they provide.

    It’s interesting, you’re challenging what a wall is – using that typology to question the meaning of a barrier or confining something. Is this an act of resistance in your mind?
    Yes, I think so. Or, at least it started out that way. When I first started walking around Los Angeles, it was easy to make work that directly contrasted the open air, natural landscapes that most would think of when they consider the term “landscape”. The images came easily, but quickly felt cliche. Somehow singular and predictable in their general pessimism. It’s easy to focus on the strictly negative–especially here in LA. It’s a dirty city with a massive unhoused population contrasted with insane wealth, all in and around and on top of itself. To treat it only as one thing—whether grimy or glamorous—would be a very narrow point of view. There are so many aspects to LA, and as I continued to walk and to photograph, I began to find myself interested in the complexity of these layers and in how they’re represented in the community architecture of subways, storefronts, traffic markings, and yes, walls. So much of it is colorful and built to look nice, but ultimately to direct or deter us in one way or another. Not meant to be comfortable. Liminal in nature. You’re allowed here, but only to a certain capacity and not for very long.

    And then, layered onto these surfaces of glossy colorful paint or polished steel are traces left—markings, scribbles, covered graffiti or hand prints that show a back and forth that is sometimes violent and other times subtle. Visual responses to this landscape, or in resistance to it.

    It’s been a fun exercise to shift from relying on obviously compelling subject matter (like penguins in Antarctica or secluded communities in Greenland) to make compelling images. I miss spending my time in nature, and I’m sure that’s seeping into my work. But this has been a very rewarding chapter that’s leading me in a direction that I’m finding quite engaging.

    Rather than responding to a market need and losing control of your photographic voice, you are staying true to your development.
    Hey, I’m trying! Your best work will always be the stuff you’re passionate about. I’ve always believed that leaning into finding and establishing your own voice as an artist will eventually lead to an identity that’s more uniquely yours rather than a style that looks like everyone else’s following whatever the latest trend. And on top of that the work that is the most fun to make often is the often strongest. Good things come from good work so I try to stay true to making work that inspires me.

    I’m still very much on this path of finding my visual identity and am constantly reminding myself to prioritize making work that gets me excited. But doing this is easier said than done, especially when you depend on your artistry for income. In my 20’s, my answer was to live in my truck. By not needing to keep up with rising rent costs I was able to pursue projects that I resonated with rather than having to sacrifice my vision to pay bills. But I recognized this as somewhat temporary solution—despite lasting 7 years on the road without paying rent!—and not likely a sustainable long term path that would lead to the things that I wanted for adult-me, like a stable family lifestyle. Now that I’m in LA, married and starting a family, things have changed and that discipline of staying true to the work that inspires you is much more difficult. LA is an expensive city and my continued path of finding my place within its working professional photography scene has not been a direct one or particularly easy. But it’s led me to some interesting places—some of which have resonated in surprising ways, like commercial fashion and architecture and others not as much. I’ve tried to remember that it’s hard to know whether or not you like something without ever trying it. There are lessons to be learned in even the most unexpected places and on the most unpleasant of jobs.

    How do you exercise discipline and fight the temptation of trends?
    I’m as tempted by trends as anyone and I’m happy to experiment with new ideas and see what sticks. I take with me whatever I think I can use to get closer to my evolving identity and leave the rest behind.


    How does fashion and architecture interplay in your images, does one inform the other?
    I’m curious about what connects us, both across continents and within our communities. My work has always touched on environment, sometime on a personal or cultural level and sometimes in more remote, abstract ways. But even when I’m in the middle of nowhere I’m thinking about how we are affected by these places and how we in turn affect them. Fashion reflects how we present ourselves to one another socially—how we choose to either fit into a social environment or stick out from it. One of the many “threads that connect us” if that’s not too on-the-nose. And I think architecture deals with how we as a society choose to interact with our physical environment. The building materials we use, the colors we choose, the space we give ourselves (or don’t) reflects so much about our societal values, our place in the world and our relationship to it. The work I’m making in school is architectural and while it doesn’t directly feature people (yet) it is still very much about people.


    Your Antarctica work is a sharp contrast to your state fair work in both tools and approach. Tell us about the approach for each.
    Both my Antarctica and State Fair work are ongoing projects and contrast each other (and themselves) as they are both unfinished collections of images made over the span of a few years and a few different developmental stages in my photographic path. I’ve had the privilege of having visited Antarctica a handful of times since 2019, and each time I go down I’ve experimented with different viewpoints and perspectives. This often manifests in a variety of obsessions with different cameras and the aesthetics that each camera system provides. From grainy black and white 35mm to color 4×5 film to digital medium format… who knows where I’ll be in my journey of endless experimentation the next time I get the opportunity to get back down there.

    As far as the State Fair goes, my wife’s family runs a chocolate chip cookie company at the Minnesota State Fair. I was never a big state fair goer growing up but since it now looks like I’ll now be going every year to bake cookies until the end of my days, I figured I’d better make some images along the way. I started with my 4×5 over my shoulder finding quieter moments amidst the dusty chaos of fried food and farm animals. The 4×5 is an ice breaker. People are curious about it and much more willing to have their photo taken than when I carry a more “normal” looking camera. But after starting back at school I was tasked with trying something completely different. Give up control. So I decided to lean into the chaos, ditch the tripod, shoot digital, play with flash, and shoot from the hip (maybe glancing at the camera’s fold-out screen, maybe not). I’ve recently been combining the 4×5 images with the digital in editorial pitch-deck PDF’s with the thought that it shows the breadth of my technical skills while covering a single event.

    After commercial and editorial success, here you are back with creating more personal work – asking more questions – what are you hopes for pushing the personal body of work?
    I’ve written like 10 different responses to this question and still don’t know if I’m any closer to being able to answer it. I’ve been pushing into the commercial and editorial worlds and I’ve certainly had wins here and there but I have by no means found any sure-footedness in either. While I continue to pursue financial stability I keep coming back to the mindset that I mentioned above: make the work that makes me feel something, at any cost, because that will be my strongest work. All the “wins” or “successes” I’ve had seem to have stemmed from work that I’ve made solely because I’m passionate about it. Personal work.

    However, when I was last in South America making Autopista Autopsia, I wasn’t quite able to find the creative flow that I’ve heard other artists talk about. I was pushing my personal work in a new direction but I was having a hard time knowing how to get there. Listening to interviews and reading about the making of projects and books that I’ve always looked to for inspiration, I would hear stories about how one image would effortlessly lead to the next or about how good it felt to be making the work that artist was making. I, on the other hand, was feeling blocked up and I didn’t know how to move past feeling like I was forcing the work. On top of it all, I didn’t feel like I had the right community to turn to for constructive criticism. For too long, I was using social media as the only arena for showing personal work and getting feedback.

    I needed help rethinking my creative process and reestablishing my relationship to the medium altogether.

    The pursuit of a MFA in photography will absolutely not provide a road-map to success in the commercial world. In fact, if anything, it’s sure to steer me in a completely different direction all together. Though I do think it will bring me closer to creating work that points me towards the core of my artistic identity. And the stronger the personal work that I can put out into the world the more likely it’ll lead to that next “win”.

    I won’t ask you about your truck, when was the last time you heard from the previous owners?
    The truck! The previous owners are a Swiss couple who are currently living out of their van somewhere in Europe. We follow each other on Instagram and I drop them a line every few month with photos or with mechanical questions about this or that as all the manuals they left me are in German. It’s a very wholesome relationship that I hope to have with whoever I pass the truck along to, someday, maybe.





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