



































“Napalm Girl” at 50: On Photojournalism and the Ethics of Care


    

 American Journal of Art and Communication 

Vol.6, Issue 4; July-August - 2023; 

1252 Columbia Rd NW, Washington DC, United States 

https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC; mail: topacademicjournals@gmail.com 

 
 

 

 

1 | American Journal of Art and Communication 

|  https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC  

THE “NAPALM GIRL” PHOTOGRAPH: A PERSONAL JOURNEY OF 

HEALING AND FORGIVENESS  
  

 

Robert Williams  

University of Iowa, USA  

  

Abstract: The photograph of Kim Phúc, the “Napalm Girl,” is one of the most iconic images of the Vietnam War. 

It has been the subject of numerous accolades, tributes, and controversies, and has been analyzed by scholars 

from a variety of perspectives. However, the ethical entailments of the photograph have not yet been fully 

explored. This paper revisits the photograph 50 years after it was taken, in order to consider the ethical issues 

raised by its representation of a child’s embodied vulnerability. 

Keywords: Napalm Girl, Terror of War, Ethics, Vulnerability   

  

 

 Introduction 

She is “napalm girl.” Her name is Phan Thi Kim Phúc. Her image—the 9-year-old child, screaming and 

naked, scalded by firebombs, seemingly running straight at us—is seared into our memories. This past summer 

marked her anniversary: 50 years before, that picture was shot, on June 8, 1972, by the South Vietnamese 

photographer Huynh Công “Nick” Ut. Often titled “Terror of War,” the photograph generated immediate 

shockwaves when it was sent out on the AP newswire. A damning marker of the war’s horrific impact on 

Vietnamese civilians, it was quickly reprinted in thousands of news outlets worldwide, and it has since been 

extolled as “one of the most memorable photographs of the 20th century” (ABC/AP, 2022, para. 25), “a defining 

public icon . . . a symbol of the horror of war in general, and of the war in Vietnam in particular” (Buell, 1999, p. 

102), and “a touchstone for international outrage about the Vietnam War” (Harris, 2022, para. 7).   

This photograph has been the subject of numerous accolades, tributes, and controversies, as well as some 

scholarly analyses. Yet the implications of “Napalm Girl/Terror of War” continue to reverberate, and its ethical 

entailments have not yet been fully explored. Revisiting it just after the world marked its half-century anniversary 

opens up new interpretations of the ethical crosscurrents at work in this representation of a South Vietnamese 

girl’s embodied vulnerability.  

The photograph, at the time it was taken and in its aftermath, has significant contemporary relevance for 

journalistic ethics. I believe its ongoing significance lies in its complex engagements with news values and codes 

of ethics as well as a philosophical approach that has vital epistemic value today: the ethics of care, a concept 

haunted by vectors of power in terms of race, gender, and nation. A contemporary turn in ethical theory for 

journalism studies examines the imperative of humanizing marginalized people and communities to advance 

social justice in both narrative and visual media (Kennedy, 2012; Thomas, 2021; Varma, 2020). The 2021 theme 

mailto:topacademicjournals@gmail.com


    

 American Journal of Art and Communication 

Vol.6, Issue 4; July-August - 2023; 

1252 Columbia Rd NW, Washington DC, United States 

https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC; mail: topacademicjournals@gmail.com 

 
 

 

 

2 | American Journal of Art and Communication 

|  https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC  

of the annual conference of the International Communication Association envisioned communication “as a 

register for creating spaces of compassion and connectedness” through the conference theme of “engaging the 

essential work of care” (International Communication Association, 2021, paras. 1, 4). Preceding these shifts, 

feminist philosophers have advanced a multifaceted approach to the ethics of care that has evolved across the past 

three decades, ever since Carol Gilligan’s (1982) interrogation of moral philosophy, In A Different Voice, was 

published.  

In this context, my analysis of “Napalm Girl/Terror of War” introduces feminist care ethics as a missing 

discourse in the news values that mobilize the selection and transmission of images of embodied vulnerability as 

well as a philosophical rubric for assessing the ethics of their consequences, particularly for the subjects of the 

images. To be clear, I am not targeting the ethical impulses of Nick Ut in his photojournalistic practice but rather 

using this photograph and its aftermath to highlight the lacuna in the news values that both drive our selection 

(and celebration) of certain texts and images and elide the impact on the subjects of journalistic practice.  

 “Napalm Girl/Terror of War” and the Imperatives of News Values  

From the moment of its publication, the photograph was instantly recognized as newsworthy: Not only 

was it widely used, appearing in the most prominent media of the day, such as the U.S. magazines Life and 

Newsweek, but it won major awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and “World Press Photo of the Year.” Its 

resonance among journalists was undoubtedly due to the fact that it exemplified contemporary news values in 

terms of its timeliness, topicality, impact, human interest, conflict/negativity, and novelty/unexpectedness. 

Though these criteria vary somewhat in different temporalities and cultural contexts, this list summarizes a 

“conventionalised repertoire of expressions that are used again and again [by newsworkers] to construe an event 

and its actors as newsworthy” (Bednarek & Caple, 2012, p. 105). As Parks (2019) notes, “News values are integral 

to every facet of journalistic decision making” (p. 785); they are the criteria by which journalists assess events 

“based on what they imagine their audiences to find newsworthy” to determine what is included in and excluded 

from media content (Bednarek, 2016, p. 27). News values are embedded practices that are consistently used by 

journalists and editors to determine what stories and images should be construed as “news,” and in that sense, 

news values in fact constitute “news.” The uses of news values are motivated by various factors, including 

economics and budgets, competition for audiences and advertising, and audience engagement and edification 

(Bell, 1991; Cotter, 2010; van Dijk, 1988). They also engage a history of the experiences, preferences, and 

worldview of those making news decisions (Heider, 2000).  

When Nick Ut took the photograph of Kim Phúc, he knew this was a newsworthy photo; he recalls that 

he thought, “Good pictures,” as he trained his camera on the bombs and then on the Vietnamese children running 

from them (Zhang, 2023). He has said people asked why he didn’t flee when the bombing began, and his answer 

has been, “If I running, I don’t make a good picture” (Goeke & Ut, 2014, p. 35). A professional photojournalist, 

Ut knew that these pictures were “good” because they encapsulated core news values.  

Ut’s motivation was also, in a sense, personal, though he was acting in his capacity as a photojournalist. 

“I wanted to stop this war,” he explained in an interview (Kaninsky, 2019, para. 8). But even in that aim, he was 

mailto:topacademicjournals@gmail.com


    

 American Journal of Art and Communication 

Vol.6, Issue 4; July-August - 2023; 

1252 Columbia Rd NW, Washington DC, United States 

https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC; mail: topacademicjournals@gmail.com 

 
 

 

 

3 | American Journal of Art and Communication 

|  https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC  

envisioning the impact of the photo on audiences, foreseeing that his visual document would catalyze antiwar 

activism.   

In that sense, the photograph he shot of Kim Phúc was about something more than the girl; it was about 

something more than her naked napalm-flayed body or her utter fear and pain. The photograph was an agent that, 

in the photographer’s view, could contribute to ending a war. It was, as Zelizer (2010) has phrased it, a paused 

invitation to engagement (p. 312): The violence of the image was synecdochal of the violence of the war. Analyses 

of this photograph have zeroed in on its inherent moral energy, its capacity to mobilize activism: “This iconic 

photo was capable of activating public conscience at the time because it provided an embodied transcription of 

important features of moral life” (Hariman & Lucaites, 2003, p. 40). Ut was exultant that after the picture appeared 

in the news, it sparked antiwar protests (Phan, 2022,1:08). “That picture stopped the war. I was so happy,” he said 

in an interview (Bayack & Todd, 2012, 2:44).  

Yet it is also crucial to note here that Ut put his camera down and helped the child as soon as he realized 

that she was burning alive as a result of the napalm (Chong, 2000). He doused her with water and took her and 

the other children to the nearest hospital, which refused to treat her until he flashed his press pass and warned 

them that her picture would appear in the news the next day, which convinced them to take her in. The girl 

survived; she and Ut have stayed in touch ever since. In the 50th anniversary remembrances of this photograph, 

the close relationship between Kim Phúc and Nick Ut has been the focus of a great deal of media attention. Ut 

has stated that the child’s life was of paramount importance to him. “Even if I were to be famous and she 

eventually died, I [thought] I will kill myself right away, I will kill myself,” he has disclosed (Phan, 2022, 8:17). 

The American journalists on the scene disappeared as soon as they’d finished shooting, Ut has said. Only he put 

down his camera and helped the wounded children. “[The American journalists] knew how important this news 

was so they needed to report it right away,” he recalled (Phan, 2022, 5:40). While Ut, too, knew that his 

photographs were newsworthy, he was also impelled by an ethics of care that interrupted deadline-driven 

ruthlessness. Rather than rushing to print his photos, he drove the children to the nearest hospital and waited until 

they were admitted before returning to the AP office to develop his film.  

Ut’s ability to integrate news values with an ethics of care raises crucial considerations in photojournalistic 

practice. The tensions between these competing priorities have been assessed in relation to many media 

representations of embodied vulnerability, especially when the vulnerable bodies portrayed were those of 

children. Examples include Kevin Carter’s (1993) contested photograph of a Sudanese girl collapsing from 

starvation while a vulture eyed her, or Nilüfer Demir’s (2015) photograph of the body of a Syrian toddler who 

drowned during his family’s attempt to escape from the civil war. “The danger,” writes Yeong (2014), “is that the 

camera itself might inhibit empathy in the photographer by encouraging the prioritization of images over 

individuals” (p. 12). This technological determinism can be extended to the recognition that in photojournalism, 

the camera is the instrument of journalistic practice and is yoked to the news values that also prioritize the “news” 

(i.e., the image that makes news—over the individual). The list of basic news values conspicuously, and perhaps 

deliberately, excludes the value of care for the subject of the photograph/news story or for the 

photographer/journalist.  

mailto:topacademicjournals@gmail.com


    

 American Journal of Art and Communication 

Vol.6, Issue 4; July-August - 2023; 

1252 Columbia Rd NW, Washington DC, United States 

https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC; mail: topacademicjournals@gmail.com 

 
 

 

 

4 | American Journal of Art and Communication 

|  https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC  

This does not mean that photographers or journalists are uncaring or self-serving, though they are often 

viewed that way. In fact, in the examples above, the photographers did care about the individuals in their pictures 

as well as the issues they indexed. Kevin Carter scared away the vulture and made sure the child got food; Nilüfer 

Demir said she felt “the silent scream” of the toddler’s body. News photographs are compelling often because 

they arouse emotion, even empathy, in the viewer. But the language of news values—terms such as timeliness, 

topicality, and so on—excludes and disallows these emotions, prioritizing criteria designed to attract audiences 

without acknowledging the affective dimensions of representation or the hierarchies of power involved. As Susan 

Sontag (1977) has famously observed, to take a photograph of suffering is “to be in complicity with whatever 

makes the subject interesting, worth photographing— including, when that is the interest, another person’s pain 

or misfortune” (p. 12). I reject Sontag’s (1977) blanket condemnation of photojournalistic practice; clearly, 

photojournalists’ ethical engagements with this idea, and with their subjects, are complex and varied. But the 

language of news values erases the possibility and value of emotional engagement and encourages Sontagian 

complicity.  

Embedded within news values are aspects of representation that inscribe, and reinscribe, power 

relationships that articulate race, gender, class, space, and place, especially when the news focuses on embodied 

vulnerability. Whose vulnerable body is represented to whom? As Chouliaraki (2006) points out, the politics of 

pity in the news usually involve presenting the pain of sufferers in the Global South to spectators in the Global 

North, comfortable “in their living rooms” (p. 4). The imagined audience is wealthy, White, and located in the 

resource-rich regions of the world. Her analysis recognizes that this differential tends “to present the sufferer as 

a moral cause to western spectators” (Chouliaraki, 2006, p. 6). The spectacle of suffering focuses on those who 

are impoverished, non-White, and located in what we once called the Third World. “Napalm girl” is an example 

of this power differential.  

The news photograph, writes Barbie Zelizer (2010), often portrays “unsettled public events” and “the 

relationship between what is shown and what is seen travels many roads” (p. 307). Thus, Nick Ut’s photograph 

may have prompted viewers to reflect on U.S. culpability for the Vietnam War; it may have catalyzed some 

humanitarian or antiwar sentiment among viewers, though the war raged on for three years after the photo was 

published. Despite this, as Schwenkel (2009) reflects, even while news photographs “may heighten moral 

awareness and public criticism,” they often concomitantly risk “objectifying and depoliticizing” their subjects (p. 

56). Zelizer (2010), too, recognizes that images like “Napalm Girl” invite “public engagement with human 

suffering and death without insisting that people pay heed to each tragedy on its own terms” (pp. 311–312). My 

argument here is that the subjectivity of Kim Phúc should be read on its own terms. It should not be displaced by 

her deployment as a symbol of the violence or “terror” of war. Her embodied experience was the focus of the 

document, the photograph. Her experience matters.  

It matters, too, that it was a girl child whose nakedness and physical torment was exposed to the world. 

The representation of suffering is gendered: the vulnerability of women and girls is depicted far more easily than 

that of men and boys, and the fact that this was a South Vietnamese girl whose naked body was determined to be 

newsworthy by a largely White male news establishment exemplifies the power dynamics at the core of news 

mailto:topacademicjournals@gmail.com


    

 American Journal of Art and Communication 

Vol.6, Issue 4; July-August - 2023; 

1252 Columbia Rd NW, Washington DC, United States 

https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC; mail: topacademicjournals@gmail.com 

 
 

 

 

5 | American Journal of Art and Communication 

|  https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC  

values. In the endless replication of the image on front pages worldwide, over the course of half a century, the 

child was not a human being whose representation might traumatize her or her family members. While it is true 

that the image prompted awareness of the violence of the war, as well as the motives and rewards reaped by those 

promoting and profiting from it, the child herself was not a person whose wellbeing called for concern or 

consideration. As she herself has said, she was just “news.”  

Ethics, News Photography, and the Entailments of Embodied Vulnerability  

The heartlessness of news values is tempered, to some degree, by professional codes of ethics, which do 

recognize that journalistic practice can have profoundly deleterious effects on subjects of the news. The Society 

for Professional Journalists’ (SPJ, 2014) Code of Ethics admonishes reporters to “minimize harm” and remember 

that sources are “deserving of respect” (paras. 26–27). The SPJ Code advocates balancing “the public’s need for 

information against potential harm or discomfort” (SPJ, 2014, para, 29). Noting that “pursuit of the news is not a 

license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness,” the code urges journalists to “show compassion for those who may 

be affected by news coverage,” especially children (SPJ, 2014, para. 30). It also recommends considering “the 

long-term implications of the extended reach and permanence of publication” (SPJ, 2014, para. 36). Similarly, 

the National Press Photographers Association (2019) observes that photographs “can cause great harm if they are 

callously intrusive,” and it guides photographers to “treat all subjects with respect and dignity,” giving “special 

consideration to vulnerable subjects and compassion to victims of crime or tragedy” (para. 11). Neither of these 

codes, nor any other of which I am aware, speak to the issue of intervention in a crisis. At what point should a 

photographer, as Nick Ut did, drop the camera and help a vulnerable person in a “newsworthy” situation? While 

this has been the topic of much scholarly and popular discussion, there is no codified guidance on this for 

newsworkers. Only the photographer’s conscience determines this course of action.  

Moreover, a news photograph of embodied vulnerability can have an impact on its subject that extends far 

beyond the moment in which the photo is taken, and this long reach is unaddressed in either news values or codes 

of ethics. Even the issue of “long-term implications” in the SPJ Code seems to focus more on misinformation 

than care for the subject. The so-called napalm girl, Kim Phúc, endured considerable psychological and emotional 

trauma as a result of the photograph’s prominence and unrelenting public visibility. “I didn’t like that picture at 

all,” she said in an interview. “I felt like, why he took my picture when I was agony, naked, so ugly? I wish that 

picture wasn’t taken” (PBS Newshour, 2020, 1:20)  

Analysts of the photo argue that Kim Phúc’s very nakedness contributed to the photograph’s impact, as it 

was so shocking according to the mores of the time (Hariman & Lucaites, 2003). Nakedness is the quintessential 

mode of embodied vulnerability: Prisoners are strip-searched, concentration camp victims were sent naked to the 

gas chambers, the “Hottentot Venus” Saartje Baartman was caged naked for the contemptuous voyeuristic gaze 

of White Victorians. Forcible nakedness is a form of humiliation, an act of subjugation, an expression of 

dominance, bound up in the intersections of race, class, nation, gender, and sex. While there may be sexual 

overtones at play, in all these instances the naked person is unequivocally among the damned. When the “Napalm 

Girl” photograph was first viewed by AP editors in 1972, they debated whether to release it at all, given the strict 

publishing laws and policies of the era. More recently, in 2016, “Napalm Girl/The Terror of War” made headlines 

mailto:topacademicjournals@gmail.com


    

 American Journal of Art and Communication 

Vol.6, Issue 4; July-August - 2023; 

1252 Columbia Rd NW, Washington DC, United States 

https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC; mail: topacademicjournals@gmail.com 

 
 

 

 

6 | American Journal of Art and Communication 

|  https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC  

again when Facebook declared it to be pornographic and banned it from its social media site (the company later 

reversed its decision).  

Just this year, in a New York Times op-ed, Kim Phúc wrote, “I grew up detesting that photo” (Phan Thi, 

2022, p. 7). The photo’s growing fame over time, she wrote, made it harder for her to maintain a private emotional 

life:  

I sat through endless interviews with the press and meetings with royalty, prime ministers and other leaders, all 

of whom expected to find some meaning in that image and my experience. The child running down the street 

became a symbol of the horrors of war. The real person looked on from the shadows, fearful that I would somehow 

be exposed as a damaged person. (Phan Thi, 2022, p. 7)  

Growing up bound to that image, Kim Phúc experienced PTSD, shame, self-hatred, suicidal ideation, 

revolted by the public experience of her nakedness and torture (Chong, 2000). It was only as an adult that she 

finally found healing and fulfillment. She has made peace with the image, understanding it now “as a reminder 

of the unspeakable evil of which humanity is capable” (Phan Thi, 2022, p. 7). But the photograph damaged her 

life almost as much as the napalm had, though it served a greater good.  

 “Napalm Girl,” the picture and the person, remind us that there are multidimensional relationships at work 

in any news photograph of embodied vulnerability. Images of embodied vulnerability, in particular, involve 

connections between the photojournalist and the subject, the photojournalist and the institution of journalism, the 

photojournalist and the audience, the photograph and the audience, and the subject of the photo and the image, 

all operating synchronously and asynchronously; and these are connections fraught with power, emotion, 

competing goals, and moral weight.   

Within this complex web of relationships, the scholarly literature has focused most often on the 

relationship between the image and the audience—asking, for instance, whether an image can move an audience 

to feel empathy or engage in humanitarian activism. But in fact the relationships linking the photographer, the 

subject, and the image call for thoughtful analysis. In many ways, the photographer and the subject are bound 

together by the image: Nick Ut will always be linked to Kim Phúc, just as Nilüfer Demir will always be linked 

with Alan Kurdi. In that linkage lies an ethical imperative to question how capturing an image of a child’s 

embodied vulnerability will affect the child, or the child’s family and community, over the course of time. It is 

also important to question how an image might affect a photographer, for journalists too suffer the emotional and 

psychological consequences that first responders and soldiers experience when they have been on the scene of 

catastrophic events. Nick Ut had nightmares and insomnia, post-traumatic stress reactions, after seeing Kim Phúc 

flayed alive in Trang Bàng (Chong, 2000, p. 307).   

Finally, the image itself has a living relationship with its subject and its maker. The image made Nick Ut 

and Kim Phúc famous, but it nearly destroyed Kim Phúc. She has been unable to escape the endless reiteration of 

her childhood agony and vulnerability. The news photograph had an indelible impact on her psyche; indeed, she 

almost lost her life to it. As Denise Chong (2000) has noted, “Kim’s life was shaped by others wanting to pull her 

back into focus” (p. xiv). In the half-century since the initial publication of the photograph, care for the “napalm 

girl’ herself was not a concern of either journalists or audiences. Ut, too, describes suffering post-traumatic stress 

mailto:topacademicjournals@gmail.com


    

 American Journal of Art and Communication 

Vol.6, Issue 4; July-August - 2023; 

1252 Columbia Rd NW, Washington DC, United States 

https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC; mail: topacademicjournals@gmail.com 

 
 

 

 

7 | American Journal of Art and Communication 

|  https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC  

triggered by his role as a war journalist: He could not forget the burning child or the war. “I had nightmares all 

the time,” he recalled. “I couldn’t get myself to see a war movie. Whenever I’d hear a helicopter fly over my 

home, I jumped out of bed” (Fernandes, 2021, para. 22). Within the institution of journalism, care for either the 

child or the journalist was unimaginable in terms of the schema of news values or even codes of ethics.  

The concept of care, writes the philosopher Margaret McLaren (2001), involves both attending to the 

wellbeing of particular others and “demands that we pay attention to social and political conditions” (p. 112). The 

feminist philosophy of care ethics rejects the claim that abstract reasoning and emotional detachment, of the kind 

found in news values, is less biased and more likely to achieve impartiality in ethical decision-making; on the 

contrary, caring feelings generate more rigorous ethical reflection and action. The ethics of care is a cornerstone 

of feminist philosophy that burgeoned out of Gilligan’s (1982) interrogation of rationale philosophy; the 

overarching concept of care ethics focuses on the significance of relationships and the moral imperatives of “the 

activities and practices of care and relationship maintenance that sustain webs of connections and minimize harm 

as best as possible” (Hamington & FitzGerald, 2022, p. 2). “The ethics of care,” writes the feminist philosopher 

Virginia Held (2006), “focuses on attentiveness to context, trust, responding to needs, and offers narrative nuance; 

it cultivates caring relations in both personal, political, and global contexts” (p. 157).  

Following this conceptualization, photojournalism is a practice that connects the personal, the political, 

and in many cases, the global. “Napalm Girl/Terror of War” exemplifies these intersecting strands, as well as 

additional dynamics of race, gender, and embodiment. In shooting and publishing the photo “Napalm Girl/The 

Terror of War,” the photographer and the news outlets demonstrably cared about informing audiences of the world, 

especially the global North, of the impact of the war on the Vietnamese people, particularly children. In real time, 

the photographer Nick Ut cared for the child by ensuring she got immediate medical attention. Yet an overall 

ethics of care was neither a value nor a practice according to normative journalistic guidelines for practice. Ut’s 

care for the child actually violated the news value of timeliness: He disregarded his deadline to drive Kim Phúc 

to the hospital and waited to make sure she was admitted. And then, once it went out on the AP wire, the mediation 

of the photograph itself contributed to long-term trauma for Kim Phúc as well as for Ut.  

From yet another angle, we know nothing of the impact of this image, or other images of the war, upon 

Vietnamese viewers. Azoulay (2008) notes that certain vulnerable people insist that photographers document their 

suffering in the belief that dissemination of such images will provoke action against atrocities. Notable examples 

are Mamie Till-Mobley’s resolute insistence that photographs of her murdered child’s body be published to 

expose the horror of lynching (Till-Mobley & Benson, 2003); or the dissemination of the “Caesar” photographs 

of tortured Syrian prisoners that provide “irrefutable proof that the Syrian government had truly detained and 

tortured thousands who disappeared” and allow families to know the truth about their loved ones’ deaths (Al-

Khalidi, Ashawi, & Nasr, 2020, para. 23). But such images are made and distributed with the consent of the 

subjects or their families; nonconsensual representation of suffering, which is often the case in news photography, 

raises very different ethical issues.   

mailto:topacademicjournals@gmail.com


    

 American Journal of Art and Communication 

Vol.6, Issue 4; July-August - 2023; 

1252 Columbia Rd NW, Washington DC, United States 

https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC; mail: topacademicjournals@gmail.com 

 
 

 

 

8 | American Journal of Art and Communication 

|  https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC  

Linfield (2010) has pondered the use of nonconsensual images in photojournalism, querying, “What would 

solidarity with the people in such photographs mean?” (p. xvi). For her, photography is a means of redressing 

injustice; she writes,  

Every image of suffering says not only, “This is so,” but also, by implication: “This must not be”; not only, “This 

goes on,” but also, by implication: “This must stop.” Documents of suffering are documents of protest: they show 

us what happens when we unmake the world. (Linfield, 2010, p. 33)  

And yet she realizes that representation alone cannot move viewers to compassion or humanitarian action: 

“Seeing does not necessarily translate into believing, caring, or acting. That is the dialectic, and the failure, at the 

heart of the photograph of suffering” (Linfield, 2010, p. 33). Undoubtedly, there is value in documenting 

embodied vulnerability and suffering if the outcome is mobilizing solidarity and humanitarian action—but these 

outcomes are never guaranteed. The uses of social media today mean that videos and images are circulated in 

ways that cannot be controlled by the creator of the image: From citizen journalism to child pornography, images 

of embodied vulnerability are disseminated without the guardrails of concern for the viewers or subjects of the 

images. Jessica Roberts (2019) calls this “the erosion of ethics” (p. 409). Such documentation carries with it real 

and damaging fallout that is only now being given serious ethical consideration.  

We are increasingly aware of the harrowing impact of war photography on both the journalists and 

members of war-torn communities. Jonisová (2022) writes about the post-traumatic stress experienced by 

photographers as well as soldiers viewing violent war imagery from Slovakia and Ukraine: “Brutal images . . . 

have an indisputable impact on the percipients” (p. 83). In recent times, Black media audience members have 

written about the retraumatizing effects of seeing the recorded 2020 murder of George Floyd replayed endlessly 

in the media. “I now believe that circulating videos of Black and brown death at the hands of police reinforces 

white supremacy. It does not deter it,” writes the USC journalism scholar Alissa Richardson (2021, para. 14).   

The point of view of the communities whose suffering makes the news has, in the past, been elided; we 

are only now becoming more aware of the importance of their perspective. Chouliaraki (2006) argues that most 

visual media representations of suffering people reinforce differences of power and inequality, despite the best 

intentions of journalists, whose aims may be altruistic and mobilized by an earnest desire to help those whose 

images they circulate. The journalists likely believe that their work could benefit the communities they cover, but 

Chouliaraki’s (2006) analysis demonstrates how news routines and norms and “the values embedded in news 

narratives [define] who the ‘others’ are and how we should relate to them” (p. 11). The representation of embodied 

vulnerability is often predicated on power hierarchies in which the suffering of less powerful people—marked as 

such by their race, gender, class, sexuality, nation, or ability—becomes a spectacle for those with greater social 

power. When photographs or video of embodied vulnerability are circulated in the news, the impact of the images 

on the sufferers’ communities is typically not a criterion for ethical editorial decision-making. Care for audience 

members belonging to the same community as the subject of the image is thus irrelevant to news values and 

journalistic codes of ethics.  

mailto:topacademicjournals@gmail.com


    

 American Journal of Art and Communication 

Vol.6, Issue 4; July-August - 2023; 

1252 Columbia Rd NW, Washington DC, United States 

https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC; mail: topacademicjournals@gmail.com 

 
 

 

 

9 | American Journal of Art and Communication 

|  https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC  

The Promise and Possibility of an Ethics of Care in Photojournalism  

To introduce an ethics of care into photojournalistic (and journalistic) practice would require reevaluating 

news values in light of vulnerability. Such a reevaluation would seek to engage more fully with the ethical codes 

that endorse consideration for the impact of the news upon the subject of the news, for his/her/their community, 

and for the journalist. It would recognize the ongoing and permanent relationship of the newsmaker, news content, 

and the person whose story constitutes the news. For the art scholar John Roberts (2014), these relationships 

constitute a social ontology “in which representation of self, other, ‘we,’ and the collective are brought to 

consciousness as part of the everyday social exchange and struggle” (p. 5). Particularly in the case of photographs, 

the potential violations that could follow the representation of embodied vulnerability as “news” must be taken 

into account: as in Kim Phúc’s experience, representation might constitute a reviolation of the person, repeated 

even as the image is reproduced. “Violation,” observes Roberts (2014), “is in a sense, built into the photographic 

reproduction of appearances” (p. 2); or in Sontag’s (1977) words, “There is an aggression implicit in every use of 

the camera” (p. 7). Photography’s violations are embedded in “power relations and material interests external to 

the act of photography itself” (Roberts, 2014, p. 2). Whether these violations are predicated on existing social 

differentials that render some bodies more violable than others must be considered in journalistic “values”: The 

role of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, ability and other identity locations need to be taken into account when 

decisions are made to disseminate images of embodied vulnerability as “news.” Do these images reassert the 

power hierarchies that created the vulnerability in the first place? If the images need to be made public, how 

should they be contextualized so that this analytics of power is made clear? And how best can the subject of the 

image be supported and protected from ongoing trauma?  

These are not easy questions to answer. I pose them in the spirit of heuristic inquiry for those of us who 

care about photojournalism and journalism and recognize their vital role in societies. As Linfield (2010) observes, 

“photographs . . . bring us close to those experiences of suffering in ways that no other form of art or journalism 

can” (p. xv). The idea of integrating service to the public good with an ethics of care challenges photojournalism 

to engage more fully with its impact, as discussed in this example of “Napalm Girl/The Terror of War.” Linking 

an ethics of care to the concept of vulnerability, especially embodied vulnerability, calls for acting to “reduce 

human beings’ susceptibility or exposure to harm, needs, loss, coercion, domination, and other unwanted 

conditions or events” (Engster, 2018, p. 106), including those brought on by mediation. Reflecting on this, if there 

is a humanitarian impulse at the core of photojournalistic practice, then the multiple dimensions of journalism-

as-care must be integrated into news values and codes of ethics.  

  

mailto:topacademicjournals@gmail.com


    

 American Journal of Art and Communication 

Vol.6, Issue 4; July-August - 2023; 

1252 Columbia Rd NW, Washington DC, United States 

https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC; mail: topacademicjournals@gmail.com 

 
 

 

 

10 | American Journal of Art and Communication 

|  https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC  

References  

ABC/AP. (2022, June 10). 50 years on, war photographer Nick Ut looks back on iconic photo with “Napalm 

Girl” Kim Phuc. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-11/nick-ut-kim-phucnapalm-girl-

photo-50-years-later/101139364  

  

Al-Khalidi, S., Ashawi, K., & Nasr, J. (2020, August 7). “They killed us twice”: Finding loved ones at last among 

Syria’s tortured dead. Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syriacrisis-families-

caesar-photos-i/they-killed-us-twice-finding-loved-ones-at-last-among-syriastortured-dead-

idUSKCN2530N7   

  

Azoulay, A. (2008). The civil contract of photography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.  

  

Bayack, T., & Todd, H. (Producers). (2012, September 12). Leica Portrait: Nick Ut, Leica Hall of Fame Award 

2012 [Video file]. YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePQSxngCi_I   

  

Bednarek, M. (2016). Voices and values in the news: News media talk, news values and attribution. Discourse, 

Context & Media, 11, 27–37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2015.11.004  

  

Bednarek, M., & Caple, H. (2012). “Value added:” Language, image and news values. Discourse, Context & 

Media, 1(2–3), 103–113. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2012.05.006  

  

Bell, A. (1991). The language of news media. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.  

  

Buell, H. (1999). Moments: The Pulitzer Prize photographs, a visual chronicle of our time. New York, NY: Black 

Dog & Leventhal.  

  

Carter, K. (1993, March 26). [Photograph]. The New York Times. Retrieved from 

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2017/03/03/world/middleeast/05so 

uthsudan-carter.html  

  

Chong, D. (2000). The girl in the picture: The story of Kim Phuc, the photograph, and the Vietnam War. New 

York, NY: Viking.  

  

Chouliaraki, L. (2006). The spectatorship of suffering. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.  

  

Cotter, C. (2010). News talk : Investigating the language of journalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University 

Press.  

mailto:topacademicjournals@gmail.com


    

 American Journal of Art and Communication 

Vol.6, Issue 4; July-August - 2023; 

1252 Columbia Rd NW, Washington DC, United States 

https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC; mail: topacademicjournals@gmail.com 

 
 

 

 

11 | American Journal of Art and Communication 

|  https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC  

  

Demir, N. (2015, September 2). “Alan Kurdi” [Photograph]. Agence France-Presse. Retrieved from 

https://www.afpforum.com/AFPForum/Search/Results.aspx?fst=nilufer+demir&pn=1&smd=8&m 

ui=3&fto=1#pn=1&smd=8&mui=3&q=11097133827160365023_0&fst=nilufer+demir&fto=1&t= 

2&cck=a1aff2  

  

Engster, D. (2019). Care ethics, dependency, and vulnerability. Ethics and Social Welfare, 13(2), 100– 114. 

https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2018.1533029  

  

Fernandes, C. (2021, August 4). Great masters: Nick Ut. Retrieved from 

http://www.betterphotography.in/perspectives/great-masters/nick-ut/116042/  

  

Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.  

 

Goeke, M., & Ut, N. (2014). Through the lens: The experience of a Vietnamese photojournalist during the Vietnam 

War. Retrieved from https://collections.digitalmaryland.org   

  

Hamington M., & FitzGerald M. (2022). Feminist care ethics confronts mainstream philosophy. Philosophies, 

7(5), 91–95. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7050091  

  

Hariman, R., & Lucaites, J. L. (2003). Public identity and collective memory in U.S. iconic photography:  

The image of “accidental napalm.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 20(1), 35–66.  

https://doi.org/10.1080/0739318032000067074  

  

Harris, G. (2022, June 8). Nick Ut, 50 years on: The story of the “napalm girl” photo. Amateur  

Photographer [Blog post]. Retrieved from 

https://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/latest/photonews/nick-ut-50-years-on-the-story-of-the-napalm-

girl-photo-167564  

  

Heider, D. (2000). White news: Why local news programs don’t cover people of color. New York, NY: Routledge.  

  

Held, V. (2006). The ethics of care: Personal, political, and global. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.  

  

International Communication Association. (2021). 71st annual ICA 2021 conference theme CFP. Retrieved from 

https://www.icahdq.org/blogpost/1523657/351698/71st-Annual-ICA-2021-ConferenceTheme-CFP   

  

mailto:topacademicjournals@gmail.com


    

 American Journal of Art and Communication 

Vol.6, Issue 4; July-August - 2023; 

1252 Columbia Rd NW, Washington DC, United States 

https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC; mail: topacademicjournals@gmail.com 

 
 

 

 

12 | American Journal of Art and Communication 

|  https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC  

Jonisová, E. (2022). The importance and consequences of war photography. Cultural Intertexts, 12(1), 68–85. 

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7431616  

  

Kaninsky, M. (2019, October 26). Story behind the terror of war: Nick Ut’s “Napalm Girl” (1972) [Blog post]. 

Retrieved from https://aboutphotography.blog/blog/the-terror-of-war-nick-uts-napalm-girl-1972  

 

Kennedy, L. (2012). Framing compassion. History of Photography 36(3), 306–314. 

https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2012.673312  

 

Linfield, S. (2010). The cruel radiance. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.  

  

McLaren, M. (2001). Feminist ethics: Care as a virtue. In P. Desautels & J. Waugh (Eds.), Feminists doing ethics 

(pp. 110–117). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.  

  

National Press Photographers Association. (2019). Code of ethics. Retrieved from https://nppa.org/code-ethics  

Parks, P. (2019). Textbook news values: Stable concepts, changing choices. Journalism & Mass 

Communication Quarterly, 96(3), 784–810. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699018805212  

 

PBS Newshour. (2020, January 16). Brief but spectacular: Kim Phúc Phan Thi, Vietnam War survivor.  

Retrieved from https://www.pbs.org/newshour/brief/329035/kim-phuc-phan-thi   

  

Phan, T. (Director & Editor). (2022, April 3). The moment: Nick Ut and napalm girl. [Video file]. YouTube. 

Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuWrGj2EGGI  

  

Phan Thi, K. (2022, June 12). “I am not ‘napalm girl’ anymore.” The New York Times, Sunday Review, p. 7.  

Richardson, A. (2021, April 21). We have enough proof. Vox. Retrieved from 

https://www.vox.com/firstperson/22391964/george-floyd-derek-chauvin-adam-toledo-police-violence   

  

Roberts, J. (2014). Photography and its violations. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.  

  

Roberts, J. (2019). The erosion of ethics: From citizen journalism to social media. Journal of Information,  

Communication & Ethics in Society (Online), 17(4), 409–421. https://doi.org/10.1108/JICES-012019-

0014  

Schwenkel, C. (2009). The American war in contemporary Vietnam: Transnational remembrance and 

representation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.  

  

mailto:topacademicjournals@gmail.com
https://aboutphotography.blog/blog/the-terror-of-war-nick-uts-napalm-girl-1972
https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2012.673312
https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699018805212


    

 American Journal of Art and Communication 

Vol.6, Issue 4; July-August - 2023; 

1252 Columbia Rd NW, Washington DC, United States 

https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC; mail: topacademicjournals@gmail.com 

 
 

 

 

13 | American Journal of Art and Communication 

|  https://topjournals.org/index.php/AJAC  

Society for Professional Journalists. (2014, September 6). SPJ code of ethics. Retrieved from 

https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp   

  

Sontag, S. (1977). On photography. New York, NY: Picador.  

  

Thomas, R. T. (2021). Social empathy + compassion: Building blocks for poverty coverage. In S. L. Borden (Ed.), 

The Routledge companion to media and poverty (pp. 74–83). New York, NY: Routledge.  

  

Till-Mobley, M., & Benson, C. (2003). Death of innocence: The story of the hate crime that changed the world. 

New York, NY: Ballantine.  

 

Van Dijk, T. A. (1988). News as discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.  

  

Varma, A. (2020). Evoking empathy or enacting solidarity with marginalized communities? A case study of 

journalistic humanizing techniques in the San Francisco Homeless Project. Journalism Studies, 21(12), 

1705–1723. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2020.1789495  

  

Yeong, W. K. O. (2014). ‘Our failure of empathy’: Kevin Carter, Susan Sontag, and the problems of photography. 

Think Pieces: A Journal of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, 1(1), 9-17. 

https://doi.10.14324/111.2058-492X.002  

 

Zelizer, B. (2010). About to die: How news images move the public. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press.  

  

Zhang, M. (2023, January 3). Nick Ut: The photojournalist who shot the iconic “Napalm Girl” photo. Retrieved 

from https://petapixel.com/nick-ut-napalm-girl-photojournalist/   

mailto:topacademicjournals@gmail.com
https://doi.10.14324/111.2058-492X.002

