NEW YORK — World Press Photo suspended Nick Ut's authorship attribution for the photograph The Terror of War in 2025. This decision follows a rival claim stating the photograph was taken by a Vietnamese stringer. The photograph depicts Phan Thi Kim Phúc, a child, after napalm was dropped by a South Vietnamese plane.

An exhibition of Alexander Gardner's photographs of the dead from the Battle of Antietam opened in New York in October 1862. The Battle of Antietam had taken place in September 1862. The photograph The Scourged Back was published in 1863. Carleton Watkins' Yosemite images were shown in New York in 1862. The National Park Service was created in 1916.

The Champagne Photo, taken in 1869, depicts two locomotives meeting with bottles raised to commemorate the transcontinental railroad, but Chinese workers who laid much of the track are not visible in that photograph. A photograph exists showing two white men in suits posing on a mountain of bison skulls, which were bound for industrial processing. Dorothea Lange photographed victims of the Dust Bowl, which occurred during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Florence Owens Thompson is the subject of Lange's photograph Migrant Mother and resented the photograph for the rest of her life. The woman in the V-J Day photograph stated, "It wasn't my choice."

In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered by two white men. His mother chose an open casket for his funeral and engaged a Black photographer to document her son's body. The mainstream white press did not print photographs of his body. Robert Capa died on assignment in 1954, a decade after D-Day. The photograph A Great Day in Harlem was taken in 1958. A photograph of workmen eating lunch on a girder in New York was taken in 1932.

In 2020, Julio Cortez took a photograph in Minneapolis following the murder of George Floyd. Workers building a sawmill in California found gold flakes in a stream in January 1848. The discovery of gold in California in 1848 started a gold rush.

Why It Matters

This suspension by World Press Photo concerns ongoing discussions surrounding photojournalism attribution and ownership, particularly concerning globally recognized images. The case involves questions about the historical documentation of events and the recognition of all contributors, including stringers, in the context of widely circulated images.

Historically, photography has played a role in documenting moments in the United States, from the California Gold Rush in 1848 to the Civil War and the Great Depression. These images have involved issues of representation and consent, as seen in the case of Florence Owens Thompson and the woman in the V-J Day photograph. The historical record also includes the decision by Emmett Till's mother to use photography to expose the brutality of her son's murder.