ABSTRACT
No photograph of the Vietnam War was more iconic than the ‘napalmed girl’. It was taken by Associated Press photojournalist Huỳnh Công (Nick) Út in 1972. The subject is Kim Phuc, the nine-year-old napalm-burned girl running towards camera crying. Many observers have felt it played a major part in bringing the war to an end by reinforcing the loss of US public goodwill. As Hariman and Lucaites describe it:
The little girl is naked, running right toward you, looking right at you, crying out. The burns themselves are not visible, and it is her pain – more precisely, her communicating the pain she feels – that is the central feature of the picture. Pain is the primary fact of her experience, just as she is the central figure in the composition. As she runs away from the cause of her burns she also projects the pain towards the viewer. The direct address defines her relationship with the viewer: she faces the lens, which activates the demanding reciprocity of direct, face-to-face interaction, and she is aligned with the frontal angle of the viewer’s perspective …The photograph projects her pain into our world.
(2007: 175–6) We return to Hariman and Lucaites’ analysis of photographic icons in Chapter 3. In this chapter we want to explore a different theoretical line about the public context of icons, extending Simon Schama’s contrast of ‘body parts’ of beauty and horror – especially because the Vietnamese girl’s pain and exposed nakedness mark the urgency of this image. Our focus is the socialist writer and public intellectual John Berger, who, like Hariman and Lucaites, is deeply concerned with the relationship between image and viewer. What Hariman and Lucaites call ‘face-to-face interaction’, Berger describes as dialogue.