Nick Ut's Napalm Girl

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Nick Ut’s ‘Napalm Girl’
A captured moment of desperation and terror; amidst the suffrage of the Vietnam war quickly became one of the most influential photographs in the world.
Phan Thi Kim Phuc was nine years old when she was photographed, naked and screaming, running towards the camera after an aerial napalm attack by the South-Vietnamese air force on her village near Trang Bang in South Vietnam.
Vietnamese American photographer Nick Ut, was 21 when he took the photograph of the ‘Napalm Girl’ on June 8th, 1972. It was featured on the front page of several newspapers including the New York Times, the very next day.
Just a short year later Nick Ut’s memorable ‘Napalm Girl’ won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize.

The iconic photograph’s immediate …show more content…

The rising popularity and commonness of television in middle class homes meant that the atrocities of the conflict on evening news was reaching wider audiences.
Hal Buell, director of photography at Associated Press argued that television footage “never matched the compelling still photos that, over and over, revealed the bitter nature of the Vietnam conflict” (Pyle 2013).
The claims made of the significant impact that ‘Napalm Girl’ had on public opinion no doubt derive from the undeniable emotion that the photograph triggers- leading to theories that the image played a role in ending the Vietnam war.

This iconic photograph is able to activate public conscience, the image becomes personal because it provides and expresses important aspects of moral life, including pain, dissolution, panic and trauma. (Hariman and Lucaites, 2003).
These aspects are strengthened by photographic representation, their connections to each other in a single image, greatly affects the audience, and demonstrates how photojournalism is capable of achieving more than verbal texts are able …show more content…

So much so, that it almost didn’t run.
9 year old Kim Phuc’s nakedness was thought to be offensive, and confrontational, prompting editors to airbrush. (Miller, 2004, p.271)
‘frontal nudity’ policies where dismissed by magazines and newspapers- the trauma of the image transcended editorial rules on nudity through a general consensus about it signifying the atrocities of a needless war. (Ibrahim, 2017)

In September of 2016 Mark Zuckerberg removed Ut’s ‘Napalm Girl’ image from Facebook- saying that the image violated the companies nudity guidelines.
Facebook has been continually criticised for allowing violent and graphic content to remain on its site, and defended its decision of the removal of the photo by expressing “its difficult to create a distinction between allowing a photograph of a nude child in one instance and not others” (Levin, Wong and Harding, 2016).

The editor and chief of Norway’s Aftenposten; Espen Egil Hansen, slammed the CEO of Facebook, accusing him of abusing power and threatening freedom of speech.
He wrote in a personal letter to

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