Nick Ut, photographer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Leica user, my first "friend" on Facebook..

Reportage photographer Huỳnh Công Út, my Facebook Friend Nick Ut.

A photography hero of mine. He took a very famous war photo. What people don't realize is that he saved the life of the subject as well. Read on.

The first day I joined Facebook, back in 2011 I stumbled upon Nick's Facebook page and was amazed. A person I admired was right there on Facebook. I asked my wife how to request a "friendship" and she told me so shyly I sent him a friend request. Boom, I was approved. Nick was my FIRST friend on Facebook. I was blown away. One of the reasons I love Facebook.

Nick was wounded four times and had a rocket come so close to his head that it parted his hair. His closest friend in the Saigon bureau, noted photographer Henri Huet, died in 1971 after volunteering to take the weary Ut’s place on an assignment during which the helicopter he was in was shot down.

It was Huet, Ut says, who gave him his nickname, Nick, after others in the bureau had trouble getting his given name straight.

“That’s why I keep the name Nick Ut. In Henri’s honor,” he says..

First a few Vietnam pics by Nick, all Kodak 400 Tri-X Leica M2/Summicron 35mm f/2.

Photo 1: South Vietnamese soldier holds his personal belongings in a plastic bag between his teeth as his unit crosses a muddy Mekong Delta stream in Vietnam near the Cambodian border, 1972. © AP Photo/Nick Ut.

Second pic: A South Vietnamese soldier kneels in prayer amid the ruins of the cathedral in La Vang, South Vietnam, on July 8, 1972 after government troops reentered the area near Quang Tri. The cathedral was damaged in fighting when the city fell to the North Vietnamese on May 1. © AP Photo/Nick Ut.

Third pic:
"The Napalm Girl", Village of Trang Bang in 1972. Her name is Phan Thị Kim Phúc. This photo captured the moment when a group of children narrowly escaped death. In the center, Kim Phuc, a 9-year-old girl was crying out loud in her naked and gaunt body as the Napalm gasoline jelly from US bombers burnt her skin. An air strike by two South Vietnamese Skyraiders from the South Vietnamese Army 25th Division had erroneously levelled the village in an attempt to dislodge a recent North Vietnamese roadblock on Route 1 near Tran Bang. Nick Ut, working for the AP, was there and took the photo. He was 21 years old.

AP's Horst Faas’ decision to publish the photo was not without opposition. Until then, there had never been images of naked children released by AP, nor by any agency for that matter. Growing up, Kim Phuc admitted hating seeing her naked image everywhere, not to mention the troubles it caused in her personal life. But both Horst Faas at that time and Kim Phuc later on understood that the image had to be out in a timely manner. Probably thanks to its never-seen-before provocativeness, it awakened American citizens that were kept in the dark. Photo won the Pulitzer Prize. Richard Nixon thought the photo was a fake. It still shocks.

BUT, there is more to this story. After getting that perfectly framed photo with his Leica M2, Nick set aside his Leica and Nikon cameras and along with British film correspondent Christopher Wain, gave the badly burned girl water, poured more on her wounds, then loaded her and others into his Associated Press van to take them to a hospital. He later learned that she had torn her burning clothes off. When doctors refused to admit her, saying she was too badly burned to be saved, he angrily flashed his press pass. The next day, he told them, pictures of her would be displayed all over the world, along with an explanation of how the hospital refused to help. They admitted the children.

"I cried when I saw her running," Ut once told an AP reporter. "If I don't help her -- if something happened and she died -- I think I'd kill myself after that."

Fourth photo, one new to me, Nick and little Kim, reunited, remaining lifelong friends.

The words of Nick Ut:

"When I first saw the napalm explosion, I didn’t think there were any civilians in the village. 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 300mm 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. I thought, “Oh my God. What happened? The girl has no clothes.” I kept shooting with my Leica M2 with my 35mm. f2 lens. 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 didn’t want her to die. I wanted to help her. I put my cameras down on the road. We poured water over this young girl. Her name was Kim Phuc. She kept yelling “nóng quá” (Too hot). We were all in shock.

Her uncle [asked if I would take all the children to the hospital]. I knew she would die soon if I didn’t help. I immediately said, “Yes.” Kim kept screaming, “I’m dying! I’m dying!” Her body was burned so badly. All her tears were coming out. I was sure she was going to die any minute in my car. When we arrived at the hospital in Cu Chi, nobody wanted to help her because there were so many wounded soldiers and civilians already there. The local hospital was too small. They asked me, “Can you take all the children to the hospital in Saigon?”

I said, “No. She’s going to die any minute right here.” I showed them my AP media pass and said, “If one of them dies you’ll be in trouble.” Then they brought Kim Phuc inside first because she was so badly wounded. Then I went back to develop my film at the AP office in Saigon."

Back in the darkroom, he helped develop the film and thought right away that perhaps with this photo of a young girl burned over more than half her body, her innocence stripped away along with her flesh, he had accomplished what his brother (who was also a photographic reporter and had recently been killed in action) had so longed to do.

“I knew, I knew,” Ut said.

“People see the picture, they understand about the war.”

 

Nick Ut's well used Leica M2. Nick shot his Pulitzer Prize Photograph "Napalm Girl" with this camera.

Leitz Summicron 35mm f/2 lens and hood.

 

I remember back in the day when my dad brought home the paper after work and I saw Nick's photograph on the front page. I was really upset by it, as were my Republican dad and my Democrat mom. I think this photo crossed all political lines. It had quite an effect on most people. Helped to end the war faster, I think.

 

This is interesting.

How the Picture Reached the World

by Horst Faas and Marianne Fulton

The famous photograph reached the newspapers around the world only after passing through a gauntlet of human decisions and technical difficulties. The technology used to produce and transmit the photograph appears antique today.

Nick Ut's eight rolls of Kodak 400 ASA black and white films were developed in the lab of the Saigon AP office by the Japanese photographer ' Ishizaki Jackson', a known AP Tokyo news photographer at this time. The development solutions (Ilford Microfen developer and self-mixed fixative) were stored in large food jars. Since the temperatures of the chemicals were rarely below 30 degree centigrade the processing time was relatively short and the film had to be slowly moved at all times, by hand, like slow-motion laundering. The films were then dried in a special cabinet with hairdryers rigged up and switched in a way as not to damage could the swelling emulsion.

Nick and Ishizaki prepared a selection of eight 5x7 inch prints for the next "radio photo cast" at 5 PM - but 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. While the argument went on in the AP bureau, writer Peter Arnett and Horst Faas, then head of the Saigon photo department, came back from an assignment. 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.

The photo was then electrically transmitted, line by line, in 14 minutes, on a manually dialed radio-phone call with a Muirhead K220 transmitter with a supplementary AM/FM converter. AP had this equipment stationed next to the switchboard at the Saigon PTT's (Post and Telegraph) telephone exchange in Saigon. The radio conditions were favorable that day and the picture, along with three other photographs of then incident reached the Tokyo photo bureau of The Associated Press. From Tokyo the radio signal coming from Saigon was auto-relayed on AP controlled land and submarine wire communications circuits to New York and London, and from there to AP offices and newspapers around the world.

AP's bureau chief Richard Pyle recalled in an April 2000 interview that Horst Faas said "I think we have another Pulitzer here" when he looked at Ut's film through his magnifying glass in 1972. Horst added in the same interview: "It remains one of the most perfect news photos I have seen in my fifty years in photo journalism."


The Camera and Lens used by Nick Ut for his Pulitzer winning photograph.

To shoot his Pulitzer prize winning photograph Huynh Cong 'Nick Ut' used the Leica M-2 body with the serial number 1923019 with a 35mm Summicron lens, serial number 1923019. It had not been AP's practice in 1972 to equip staff photographers with the German-made Leitz (Leica) cameras and lenses. Nikon equipment was the standard AP issue. However, every staff photographer of AP in Vietnam, eventually used his "own Leica" equipment, following the example of Horst Faas, who arrived in Vietnam in June 1962 with his "own" Leica equipment coming from an assignment in Algeria.

Expense accounts and some fudging in the acquisition of "capital investments", i.e. cameras, lenses etc., in Hong Kong or from the black market in Saigon helped the photographers get their high-quality Leica cameras and lenses.

Nick Ut's elder brother, who died in battle in October 1965 used, of course, a Leica camera. Thus it was only natural that his little brother Ut eventually also had his own Leica. When Nick Ut was evacuated from Vietnam at the end of the war he took the camera and lens with him - and used both until the late eighties. He only lost his 50mm Leica lens in the hasty flight from Vietnam in 1975.

Other equipment used to shoot scenes around the "Kim Phuc incident" included a Nikon F body, with 200mm, 300mm and a wide-angle lens.

The Leica and 35mm Summicron are today exhibited at the Science Museum in London, along with Nick's pictures and a wire photo drum transmitter of the Muirhead K220 type that transmitted Ut's photographs from Saigon into the world on radio waves.

A check with the Leitz archives in Germany showed that Nick Ut's camera was produced in Germany in 1965.

 

She seems like a wonderful person.

 

That was good, thanks. They saved her life and shortened the war. Not bad for a day in Vietnam.

Btw, when I lucked into a Leica M2-R (Rapidloading) I couldn't believe the ease of putting in a new roll. Just as easy as the M4 and M6.

 

Thanks, I'm on it.

I had forgotten how powerful his photographs are.

Heh, he probably went all-Leica because of the weight difference!

 

Your dad was a Seabee? Respect.