Not that there were many good ones, at least not during the Vietnam War. Highway 1 then, as it is now, was a vital artery connecting Saigon with Cambodia.
Nick Ut: I left Saigon around seven A. During the war, I traveled up and down Highway 1 all the time. There were no traffic lights on the highway back then. It was a very dangerous drive. The Viet Cong were hiding everywhere. After the Americans and South Vietnamese military shot the Viet Cong, they would leave dead bodies by the side of the road as a warning to not join or assist the Vietcong.
Some Viet Cong were very young—15 years old. June 8, , was the second day of heavy fighting around Trang Bang.
As I drove up there, I saw thousands of refugees coming down the road. More than 10 cameramen were there. In the morning, there was very heavy fighting and bombing in the village, so some of the media left before they dropped the napalm because they thought they had gotten enough material.
They dropped the napalm around P. I had four cameras: two Nikons and two Leicas, and mm. Forty years ago, you needed to carry around a lot of lenses. I had around 50 rolls of Tri-X film and some color negative film and a couple of rolls of slide film. Four napalm bombs were dropped. In the previous two days, thousands of refugees had already fled the village.
Then I started to see people come out of the fireball and smoke. I picked up my Nikon camera with a mm and started shooting. As they got closer I switched to my Leica. First there was a grandmother carrying a baby who died in front of my camera. Then I saw through the viewfinder of my Leica, the naked girl running. What happened? The girl has no clothes. That camera is now in the Newseum in Washington. I took almost a roll of Tri-x film of her then I saw her skin coming off and I stopped taking pictures.
I wanted to help her. At 68, his day still begins with the camera and his life is all about taking pictures.
He says that the child in the picture, Kim Phuc - who is now 55, is like his daughter and they have become family. The skin on her hand and her back still bears the scars of the bombing even after so many years, nothing much can be done about. We had met at Georgia recently where I had asked her to come for the Amsterdam trip. It was a residential area and I saw people running. I saw a lot of people running, including women who were wiping their tears.
And then, I saw her, she was screaming… I wondered why she was naked, then I realised napalm had fallen on her. I immediately poured water on her body, her hands and her back. Nick Ut took her in his vehicle to the hospital which was a bit far. A nurse soon arrived but said the hospital was not equipped to treat her and asked me to take her to another hospital.
She kept on insisting and then, after I revealed my identity as a media person and showed her my identity card as an Associated Press AP photographer, she finally acquiesced. Nick Ut and the girl soon established a rapport and the long association started from there. Kim Phuc is now based in Canada.
The photograph that remains as the defining moment of the Vietnam war, won the Pulitzer Prize in and is part of history. Simpson trial, the legal hassles of actor Robert Downey Jr. His coverage of the Rodney King riots that engulfed LA, which, Ut says, triggered traumatic memories of war, was also influential. Ut says as a photojournalist, the Vietnam War gave him and his fellow professionals opportunities to tell stories that are simply impossible today.
Much of that has to do with military censorship, which, according to Ut, is a direct result of the candid images that emerged from Vietnam. Nobody stopped me. The American soldiers in Saigon were so lonely. They wanted me to take their pictures. They wanted their families to see their pictures in the newspapers.
If they see you taking a photo, they tell you to delete it. If you try anything like the candid shots of Vietnam, they would never allow it. He says that once he was asked if his small frame makes it difficult to get certain shots.
I told people, if I was just a little taller, my head would be gone! Ut helped save the life of Kim Phuc, the girl in his famous picture, setting aside his cameras and taking her to a hospital in Saigon.
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