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Home : A&E Section
July 6 - July 12, 2000


POWs Waiting for Apologies
(in National News)

API Advisory Commission Visits S.F.
(in Bay Area News)

Asian Food Markets in the Bay Area
(in Business)

Lampo Leong's Forces • Contemplation
(in A&E)

Reasons to Celebrate
(in Opinion)

Picture of War

Famous photograph, camera have place in new exhibition

By Sue Leeman/AP

Associated Press photographer Nick Ut’s searing picture of a 9-year-old Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm bomb went on display June 27 for the first time with the camera used to shoot the famous image.

The 1972 shot of Phan Thi Kim Phuc earned Ut, then just 21, a Pulitzer Prize—news photography’s highest honor—and thrust the burned, screaming youngster into photographic history.

Along with other wrenching Ut images from that far-off day, they form part of a display on technology at the 50 million pound ($75 million) futuristic new Wellcome Wing of London’s Science Museum, which opened to the public July 3.

“This is a good place to show the camera because a lot of people will see it,” said Ut, who attended the press launch June 27 with Kim Phuc, now a longtime friend. “Everyone knows the photo, but not the camera.”

In preparing the exhibit, senior curator Andrew Nahum said he looked at many famous photographs “but I couldn’t persuade myself that any of them had the emotional power of the Kim Phuc photo.”

“More than just showing the iconic image, we want to unpack the history around it,” Nahum said. So the exhibit identifies other children in the photo, including Kim’s older brother, who lost an eye but survived the battle at the village of Trang Bang, 25 miles northwest of Ho Chi Minh City.

Next to Ut’s Leica viewfinder with its wide-angle lens stands one of the machines used to wire photographs around the world from the Vietnam conflict. Other Ut pictures show Kim Phuc’s mother and grandmonther and two of her male cousins, one just nine months old, who died in the fighting.

Stretched over four floors, the Wellcome Wing has displays on genetics, digital technology, bio-medicine and artificial intelligence, and a 450-seat IMAX cinema with a seven-story screen.

One section devoted to new developments already displays details of last week’s announcement that scientists have mapped the human genetic code, or genome.

“Most museums have a ‘build and walk away’ philosophy,” said John Durant, head of the Wellcome Wing program. “We will stay on the pace.”

Kim Phuc, who was successfully treated for her burns in West Germany, later studied and married in Cuba, and defected to the West in 1992.

Seventeen years after Trang Bang, she met the man who had made her famous and they became friends. Ut, still an AP photographer and now based in Los Angeles, often visits her and her family in Toronto.

Ut returned to Trang Bang in April, the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, but it is still too early for Kim Phuc. She has not visited her homeland since leaving in 1986.

“I am not ready yet, financially or emotionally,” she said last week. “Some day, I’ll go. Now I’m just happy to be free.”


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