It Was the Photo That Shook the World. Decades Later, a New Mystery Surrounds It.

"You know the image so well even a few words can conjure it in your mind: A 9-year-old girl, naked, runs down the middle of the road, her face contorted in pain, arms outstretched. The photograph, taken outside the Vietnamese village of Trang Bang in 1972, changed the course of the Vietnam War and, according to some of the subjects in Bao Nguyen's documentary The Stringer, permanently altered the way we understand war itself."

"When Zach Cregger, the writer-director of , was searching for a way to embody the trauma left when children fall victim to inexplicable violence, he knew just what to evoke. As the movie's third graders slip out of their parents' houses in the middle of the night, in the grip of forces they will never understand, he writes in the film's script, "they run like the naked Vietnamese girl covered in napalm from that iconic photo.""

"That photo, sometimes called "The Terror of War," or simply " Napalm Girl," changed other things too, namely the life of Nick Ut, the 21-year-old photographer who won the Pulitzer Prize for getting the shot, and Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the photograph's central subject, who survived to become a pharmacist and peace activist. But Nguyen's documentary, which debuts on Netflix today, casts doubt on whether it was Ut who actually captured that image,"

A 1972 photograph of a napalm-burned 9-year-old Vietnamese girl running naked down a road became an iconic image that reshaped public perception of the Vietnam War. The image elevated photographer Nick Ut to international prominence and helped define Phan Thi Kim Phuc's later life as a pharmacist and peace activist. A newly released documentary raises questions about the photograph's attribution and presents an investigation led by photojournalist Gary Knight. The investigation, citing former AP photo editor Carl Robinson, claims that multiple photographers shot the scene and that AP editors in Saigon selected images from many frames of a friendly-fire napalm attack on fleeing civilians.

Read at Slate Magazine