A picture is worth a thousand tears

 

A picture is worth a thousand tears

 

Photographs of suffering children have the power to soften the opinion we have about “the other”. Will it still happen in a polarized era? February 19, 2020

The New York Times

Opinion

Comment

1972.- In the Viet man War, Associated Press photographer Nick Ut takes the famous Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of the girl Phan Thị Kim Phúc running naked down a road, burned by napalm. Nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc (centre) fleeing her village in southern Vietnam in 1972. She had stripped off her burnt clothing after her community was bombed with napalm .Credit...Nick Ut/Associated Press By Margaret Renkl The author is a columnist for The New York Times. NASHVILLE — On June 8, 1972, Nick Ut, a Vietnamese photographer for The Associated Press, captured a now-iconic photograph of children fleeing napalm mistakenly dropped on their village by South Vietnamese forces. In the center of the image, a naked 9-year-old girl named Phan Thi Kim Phuc can be seen. She is in agony. Her skin seems to be melting. None of the soldiers in the background is looking at the children. Only the photographer observes the girl's pain. Now we all see the girl's pain. The photo, published by The New York Times and other newspapers three days later, shocked readers with its forceful portrayal of the costs of war. The photograph won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Later that year, US forces withdrew from Vietnam. Whether or not the photo was directly related to the withdrawal, at the very least it fueled growing anti-war sentiment in the United States and perhaps hastened the end of the war. “The Napalm Girl” is part of a tradition of photojournalism that promotes social justice. As with Ut's photo of Kim Phuc, it's never entirely clear whether these images are the real cause of the community's shift toward empathy, but the correlation, at least, is almost always apparent.

With affection,

Ruben