Given my interest in photography and forensic image analysis, only now I had the chance to the read the full AP documentation of the “Napalm Girl”. It is a cruel and exciting story but a perfect example of provenance research.
Any effort to reconstruct what happened on the road using available footage is going to be imperfect, with a wide margin for error. It’s important to keep in mind this took place in an analog world, where film stock and camera rolls were a finite resource… [Ut’s Peentax] camera was tested by AP on April 18, 2025. The results appear to show very clear similarities to the famous image and are another marker to suggest that the famous image was likely taken with a Pentax. The negative images do not match exactly. The camera itself seems to be in mint condition, so it is unlikely to have been used in combat for any length of time, and given the date of manufacture, could not have been inherited from Ut’s brother. The investigation showed Ut owned Pentax cameras and used Pentax cameras
while covering the war. It does not prove he held a Pentax in Trang Bang on June 8, 1972.
