subscribe 0330 333 1113 I http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk I 7 March 2020 23
Above: ‘Napalm
Girl’ taken in 1972,
is one of the few
war images that
helped to change
the course of
modern historyALL PICTURES © NICK UT/AP/SHUTTERSTOCK
many other southern Vietnamese
linked to the US-backed
government or Western media
organisations, Ut fled his home
country in 1975 for a new life in the
US as a photographer with The
Associated Press (the other AP).
A chance meeting
Fast-forward 46 years, and in one of
those wonderful coincidences that
make travel so rewarding, I bump
into Nick Ut at the famous Thien
Hau temple in central Saigon/Ho
Chi Minh city. He’d briefly stopped
off in Vietnam on the way to
Indonesia to give a talk for Leica,
while I was there on holiday. With
his mop of silver-white hair, piercing
eyes and pricey rangefinders, Ut was
instantly recognisable, at least to
this jet-lagged camera nerd. Much
to my delight, he agreed to chat, and
even better, then spent a good 15
minutes taking pictures of my
somewhat bemused girlfriend
around the temple grounds. His
passion for photography is very
much still there, as is the old
determination and steeliness; I
pitied the temple jobsworth who got
a withering stare and what I assume
was a pithy putdown in Vietnamese
when he asked Ut to stop blocking a
path. This is a guy who’d probably
been a permanent fixture on the
Viet Cong’s hit list, so good luck to
any bureaucrat who takes him on.Family tradition
Nick Ut was born Huynh Cong Ut
in the Mekong Delta region in 1951,
a couple of hours’ drive from
Saigon. ‘My older brother was an
AP photographer and he was my
influence in wanting to become a
photographer,’ Ut explains, in still
heavily accented English.
‘Although he was killed while
covering the war in 1965, I still
wanted to become like him. It is
through the grace of God that
the editors at AP gave me a job as
a 16-year-old, processing film
and making prints. I learned
from those editors and from
looking at the images coming
in from the war.