Photojournalist Nick Ut, who won a Pulitzer for shooting the iconic Vietnam War photograph known as “Napalm Girl,” retired Wednesday after working for the Associated Press for 51 years. Wednesday was also his 66th birthday.
Ut was 21 when, on June 8, 1972, he took a photo of 9-year-old Kim Phuc while she was naked and fleeing her village as result of a misdirected Napalm attack by the South Vietnamese military. After noticing that Phuc was badly burned, Ut used his media credentials to get her treated at a hospital.
Phuc is now a 53-year-old wife and mother of two in Canada. Ut and Phuc remain friends to this day.
After the former capital of South Vietnam fell, Ut went to California as a refugee in 1975. He would move on to Tokyo for AP, and eventually to Los Angeles in 1977, where he went on to cover a variety of topics, from celebrities and earthquakes to the O.J. Simpson trial and the Los Angeles riots of 1992.
Ut has described his career as “hell to Hollywood,” according to AP. Now that he’s retired, he plans to use his time to take care of his grandchildren and take more photos.
“I’ll take pictures until I die,” Ut told AP. “My camera is like my doctor, my medicine.”
