2026-03-09
31 分钟This is The Guardian.
Today the mystery behind two really took one of history's most famous photographs.
It's a terrifying photograph of a group of children running down a road in Vietnam away from a temple that is consumed by black smoke from a napalm attack.
Gary Knight has been a conflict photographer for over three decades.
He's worked all over the world, Bosnia, Iraq,
Afghanistan, covering war and the scars it leaves behind.
He understands the power of an image to tell a story but we were here to talk to him about one photo taken more than 50 years ago that could be the most powerful war photograph of all time.
And at the centre of the photograph is a nine-year-old girl and on the left is her brother and on the right cousin.
The little girl in the middle of the photograph is running down the road towards the camera and she's screaming in pain and in terror.
She's also naked.
Her clothes have been burnt off by the napalm that's just been dropped on the village behind her,
which is now engulfed in thick, black clouds of smoke.
It's a photograph that really represents the suffering of innocent civilians.
A nine-year-old child, you know, nothing is more innocent in war than that, right?
This photo became an iconic image of war almost as soon as it was published in June 1972.
Within a day,
it was on the front page of the New York Times and in nearly every Western newspaper and magazine shortly afterwards.
In many ways, it became one of the lasting images of the war to the world, right?
And it becomes ingrained in our community of, like, what happened there.
This is filmmaker Bao Nguyen.