Kim Phuc Phan Thi was a symbol of the horrors of war. Now she is a symbol of peace.
 | By Peter Catapano Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
I have a confession to make. |
Lately, I've been ignoring my news alerts. I've turned off push notifications. When breaking news emails arrive in my inbox, I leave them there to languish, unopened. Or I at least pause before clicking, and think, Do I really want to see this now? Do I really want to know? |
Almost everyone I know is grappling with questions like these. We must bear witness, but how much? The carnage of Ukraine. Months of it. Then the Buffalo-Uvalde-Tulsa onslaught, a whiplash sequence of incomprehensible violence. And so I proceed with caution. There are some things, once seen, that we cannot forget. |
This week 50 years ago, readers of newspapers all over the world were faced with an image they may have wished to never see — a photograph taken on June 8, 1972, by an Associated Press photographer in the South Vietnamese village of Trangbang. |
You know this image. A group of soldiers and children are fleeing the scene of an errant napalm attack that had seconds before engulfed them in flame. A 9-year-old girl is at the center. She is naked, having torn off her burning clothes, screaming in pain, her arms spread wide as she runs. |
In time, this photograph would become inscribed into the memories of generations, an enduring emblem of the horror and depravity of war and the suffering of its youngest victims. In her book "On Photography," the critic Susan Sontag wrote that this photograph "probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a hundred hours of televised barbarities." |
But as famous as this image has become, an important detail has been lost on many. The girl at the center of the photo survived. Her name is Kim Phuc Phan Thi. She is alive and thriving. |
In a guest essay for Times Opinion today, Phan Thi recounts her experience of that day and the decades-long journey of pain and healing, both physical and psychological, that followed that moment. And she reflects, too, on the obligation we have to confront images of violence as directly as possible. |
The 1972 photo has been referenced many times these past few weeks in debates about how much graphic violence the news media should publish, and how much we as readers and concerned citizens should see. If anything, it has reinforced the importance and power of photography as a vehicle to help us understand the world. |
The photographs that accompany Phan Thi's essay, which show her at home, in moments of peace, say as much about hope and the possibility of transcendence in a sometimes brutal and unforgiving world than any words could. |
I am going to take a good, long look at them. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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