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Kim Phuc was the subject of a famous photo from the Vietnam war which shows her as a child running naked after being severely burned by a napalm attack. She is joined by UC Davis faculty to consider photographic images that have changed history. Series: "Mondavi Center Presents" [5/2007] [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 12409]

Wars have a way of reducing themselves to moments, single memories, tiny episodes. Here, pictures have a thousand-to-one advantage over words. The 10-year Vietnam War was summed up in four photographs: Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams captured the instant in 1968 when South Vietnamese Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executed a Viet Cong prisoner on a Saigon street. Nick Ut snapped a picture of Kim Phuc, a Vietnamese girl, fleeing naked down a highway in Vietnam after a napalm attack in 1972. Ron Haeberle took a picture of the limp bodies of the My Lai massacre victims after they were shot in 1968. John Filo caught Mary Ann Vecchio screaming over the body of a fellow student slain by National Guardsmen during a war protest at Kent State University in Ohio in 1970. These photographs, it could be argued, tilted the whole balance of public opinion against the war. What occurred on the battlefield was rendered largely irrelevant by what occurred when certain photons massed themselves into images and rushed into the retinas and minds of the American public.