Exactly 35 years after taking his Pulitzer-winning photo of an injured girl in Vietnam, Nick Ut shot another young woman in distress - Paris Hilton. Both pictures made news worldwide. And both are depressingly of their time. By John Preston
On 8 June this year, a photographer named Nick Ut shot a picture of Paris Hilton sitting in the back of a car in Los Angeles. Hilton, who had just learnt that she would be serving 23 days in jail for a traffic violation, is crying in the photograph.
She sits hunched up in the car seat with a hank of hair falling over her face. This lends her a certain poignancy, as if she's making a futile effort to conceal herself from the camera's gaze.
That day, several hundred photographers were waiting outside her West Hollywood home and there was the usual frantic scrum when she emerged. But it was Ut who got the photo that went around the world.
'I was very lucky,' he says. 'I was shooting on my motor-drive and I managed to get one good picture as the car sped away.'
Thirty-five years earlier - to the day - Ut had taken another photograph of a crying female, also with a hank of hair falling across her face. But in every other respect, the pictures couldn't be more different.
Then 21 years old, Ut was working as a photographer for Associated Press in Saigon when he heard that the South Vietnamese Air Force was napalming a village called Trang Bang. By the time he arrived, the village was engulfed in black smoke and the road leading to it was on fire.
Out of the smoke came a group of children, running towards him. First was a little boy in shorts, his face locked in a rictus of shock. Behind him was a naked nine-year-old girl.
She had torn her clothes off because they were burning her and was screaming, Nong qua! Nong qua! - 'Too hot! Too hot!' As the girl came closer, Ut saw that what he had assumed were strips of clothing hanging from her shoulders were actually strips of skin.
This photograph, too, went around the world. It won Ut a Pulitzer Prize and became one of the key images of the Vietnam War, creating such shock and revulsion that it was widely credited with hastening the American withdrawal from South-east Asia.
On recently released audio tapes, President Nixon can be heard talking to his Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, angrily claiming that the photograph must have been 'fixed'.
In the intervening 35 years, much has changed in photography - and perhaps what's changed most of all is the way in which photographers view their subjects. It's a relationship that has become increasingly intrusive and increasingly unforgiving, with an ever-increasing number of photographers seeing their subjects merely as prey, to be captured in as much distress, or embarrassment, as possible.
Whether he likes it or not, Ut is a pivotal figure in all this. Three years after he took his celebrated photograph, he decided to come to America. He was detained in a refugee camp outside Los Angeles for a month.
When he came out, he discovered to his surprise that he was famous: the man whose photograph had helped to end a war. Nancy Sinatra once embraced him in the street; Warren Beatty told him, 'When I saw your photograph, I said to Joan Baez, we are against the Vietnam War.'
And now?… now he's just another Paris Hilton snapper. 'To be honest, I don't really mind what I shoot,' he says. 'I'm just grateful to have the work.'
Fifteen years ago, there were only about 25 paparazzi in LA. These days, between 300 and 400 roam the streets of Beverly Hills. Together, they generate about 120,000 images a week, which are beamed straight to the computer screens of more than 20 specialist agencies.
In September, the American celebrity website TMZ launched its own television show in the States. Like the website, it consists of endless paparazzi shots and videos of celebrities. Meanwhile, in Britain, a scrum of paps pitches camp outside Amy Winehouse's flat every night, banging dustbin lids at 4am to rouse her from sleep.
They snap away when she emerges, unmade-up and bleary-eyed, to ask what the hell they're playing at.
Why does anyone do it? That's easy enough: money. A good image, bought non-exclusively, will make between $1,500 and $2,000 for print publication. For exclusive rights of a middling celebrity doing something mildly interesting, you can get as much as $15,000.
When I interviewed the actress Claire Danes earlier this year, she told me that every morning, as she steps out of her apartment in New York City, there are at least three or four people waiting to snap her. Two years ago, there was nobody. Danes is hardly a Hollywood A-list star, but plainly there's still a market for shots of her going to the shops, or taking her dog for a walk.
As for the really big stuff, the potential rewards are almost limitless. Two years ago, US Weekly paid $500,000 for a set of photos of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie walking along a beach in Africa. And this was only for American rights: a worldwide sale could double or even triple that.
US Weekly runs a regular feature called 'Stars - They're Just Like Us!', in which soap stars are caught picking their noses, or mooching around a supermarket with their flies undone.
The feature is based on the assumption that every part of a celebrity's existence - spots, bogeys, the lot - belongs to the public, that these people have sacrificed any right to privacy by their desire to be famous.
But of course, these people aren't really like us at all. And our attitude to their pain or distress tends to be very different to other people's pain and distress.
Instead, we seem to regard any upset that a celebrity suffers as being inherently phoney, almost an extension of their on-screen roles. All right, they may be throwing up in a gutter, or caught with their skirts round their ears, but hey, it's all harmless fun. And even if something really traumatic is going on, so what? They're basically asking for it.
What's doubly strange here is that these people are being venerated on the one hand, and dehumanised on the other. The same fans who pore over the latest pictures of Britney Spears emerging from yet another PR car crash will happily rush out and buy her new album.
They don't seem to regard this as anything weird or paradoxical: it's all part of the same process of consumption. After all, they own her.
As for real pain as suffered by non-celebrities, this - journalistically at least - has almost slipped out of the frame. In terms of war footage, America learnt its lesson from Vietnam. Now coverage of the war is so tightly controlled that few images make it onto the front pages of American newspapers.
Over the summer, weeks went by with scarcely a photograph from Iraq to be seen. However, the latest travails of Ms Spears were covered day after day in microscopic detail. The lesson was clear: when it comes to choosing between real or non-real life, the American media plump for non-real every time.
If there's an irony here, it's that the photographers who lie in wait for the latest celebrity smash-up probably aren't that different to the young photographers who headed off to Vietnam almost 40 years ago. Whereas once South-east Asia was the Wild West for ambitious thrill-seekers eager to make their names, now it's the streets of Beverly Hills.
But it's not just the location that's changed; attitudes have, too. When he saw Kim Phuc running towards him out of a cloud of smoke 35 years ago, Ut's first instinct - after he'd taken her photograph - was to save her life.
He washed off the napalm, wrapped her in a soldier's jacket and drove her to a hospital, where she had 17 operations on her back and arms. It was the start of what has become an extremely close friendship; they still talk every week on the phone.
'Kim is like family to me,' he says. 'Almost a daughter. In fact, when I went back to see her in the village after she came out of the hospital, a lot of people mistook me for her father.'
Nearly 2,000 miles away, outside Toronto, Kim, now 44, runs a charity which tries to help children in areas ravaged by war.
'Uncle Ut definitely saved my life,' she tells me. 'When we arrived at the hospital, the doctors all thought I was going to die. I had third-degree burns over 65 per cent of my body. After everything that had happened to me, he was the one person who restored my faith in human nature.'
Just as his photograph of Kim Phuc has defined Nick Ut's life, so it continues to haunt him. Looking at it now in his portfolio, between his shots of O.J. Simpson beaming on the courthouse steps and Sylvester Stallone staring down Dolly Parton's cleavage, his eyes fill with tears.
'It does make me very emotional, every time,' he says.
'It's a strange feeling because I know I will never take another photograph that's as good as this - not as long as I live. When I look at my photograph of Kim and my photograph of Paris Hilton, I think they are both good pictures, in their way. I suppose the big difference is that I grew to love Kim, whereas… well, frankly, I don't give a damn about Paris Hilton.'
