Public Identity and Collective Memory in U.S. Iconic Photography: The Image of "Accidental Napalm"

Abstract

Thirty years after the fact, the Vietnam War continues to haunt the collective memory of the United States. One of the primary embodiments of that haunting is the image of a naked girl running down a road toward the camera, screaming in pain and terror from the napalm burns on her back and arms. The photograph, often dubbed “accidental napalm,” provides a complex construction of viewer response that was uniquely suited to the conditions of representation in the Vietnam era, while it reflects a continuing struggle within public culture since that time. In this essay, we offer a close reading of the photograph as a performance of public judgment, and we explore its subsequent history of appropriation. We argue that the photograph functions as a powerful emotional and inventional resource for animating moral deliberation and democratic dissent as it mediates the “stranger relationality” central to public engagement. At the same time, the image also motivates dominant narrative responses that reinscribe liberal ideology to inhibit collective memory and public accountability. This ambivalence in the circulation of the iconic image is grounded in fundamental affinities between photographic representation, public culture, and mass media.