Items filtered by date: December 2024

From Hell to Hollywood producer Jon Kroll (left) at the Roxy Cinema Wellington premiere with National Press Club’s Christopher Turver who reported from Vietnam during this era with Nick Ut, Richard Long another National Press Club Vietnam Warco of the era, and Scott Templeton who directed the film

From Hell to Hollywood Producer Jon Kroll and Nick Ut Meet Club Warcos

No single newspaper or even broadcast image ever had the same applied impact as Nick Ut’s AP photograph of the napalmed girl running naked down the road toward him.

If it didn’t actually stop the war in Vietnam it became an indelible identifiable hinge of the accumulated evidence that did lead to the end of it.

In the event the photograph was expedited by another AP journalist New Zealander Peter Arnett and thus it was that the image became seared into newspaper history becoming the recognisable pictorial high water mark of the newsprint era.

This was over half a century ago and this following question now becomes inescapable for anyone in the conventional media.

What exactly does happen when someone at the outset of their career achieves something that they and their fellow practitioners know cannot be reprised ever again by them or indeed by anyone else?

If you are Nick Ut you carry on working and do so for the same company, Associated Press.

At war’s end he was an obvious target for the insurgent communist regime and Ut was offered employment in the United States.

Where would he like to be based?

In Hollywood, was the reply.

He again displayed the curious blend of timing and instinct that now saw him positioned in the hub of the entertainment firmament comfortably before it too entered its own industry plateau.

Softly spoken and slight of build it was now that the energetic Ut deployed another reportorial asset.

This is the one which allows certain journalists to quietly insinuate themselves into the confidence of officialdom and it was this trait that saw Ut strategically positioned for show case trials such as the one for OJ Simpson.

After over 50 years service Nick Ut retired as AP staffer in order to focus on subjects that he believed mattered notably wildlife and nature in general.

Meanwhile Napalm Girl (below) which garnered him a Pulitzer remains a compounding subject for study because of the way in which its component parts literally illustrate the theory and practice of photography.

It displays for example the axiom of that other Leica aficionado Henri Cartier-Bresson that photographs should never be cropped. That they depend for effect on what Cartier-Bresson identified as the decisive moment.

Thus the anguish of the napalmed children becomes accelerated, emphasised, by the black and white preoccupation if not indifference of the soldiers in the background and periphery.

Their insouciant demeanour far from being a distraction fortifies point-counterpoint the horror of the moment.

Napalm Girl remains a continuing touchstone of our times.

It detonated a social media era firestorm when Facebook among other platforms decided that portrayal of child nakedness was abhorrent to contemporary societal standards.

It was reinstated. But not before Napalm Girl triggered a searching philosophic evaluation of Facebook and its ilk’s exact status in terms of technology and media.

In turn this conjures up that other decisive moment all those years before.

This was when Nick Ut’s two superiors at AP the late Horst Faas and National Press Club Lifetime Achievement laureate Peter Arnett that day in 1972 held in their hands Nick Ut’s appointment with destiny.

They ushered the shocking image through layers of editorial caution and into print journalism history.

From Hell to Hollywood ranks as an instructional film for practitioners because it shows how Nick Ut intentionally or instinctively presaged a number of trends in applied journalism that are so visible today.

This began at the inception of his international intervention when instead of an exclusive pre-occupation with getting his negatives on the wire Nick Ut’s priority was to ensure that the Napalm Girl and the other burned children were bound for hospital.

This personal nature of his approach presaged the era today of an emphasis on participatory journalism in contrast to the cool detached so-called professional values so dominant in the last century.

He took his subjects personally from getting to know officers in the Fire Department to the numerous celebrities who crossed his lens.

The film notes how his prey became his wards in the form of a vignette showing a legally beleaguered Paris Hilton being door stepped by Ut adjacent to a cut of a re-ascendant Hilton blowing kisses to the photographer at a fashion gala.

The film can be viewed regionally on Apple TV, Kanopy, Amazon, and Prime.