SPJ-Los Angeles Will Honor Nick Ut With Lifetime Achievement Award
LOS ANGELES, CA (April 17, 2009) – The Greater Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists will honor Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press photojournalist Nick Ut with a special Lifetime Achievement Award, SPJ-Los Angeles banquet chair Roberta Wax announced.
This year's SPJ-Los Angeles chapter dinner mark's the society's 100th anniversary, the chapter's 75th anniversary, and it will be their 33rd annual Distinguished Journalists Awards banquet, Wax said.
Huyng Cong Nick Ut won the Pulitzer Prize for news photography in 1973 for his iconic photograph of nine-year-old Kim Phuc, severely burned, fleeing her village in Trang Bang, Vietnam, after a napalm attack on June 8, 1972. The girl was running with her brothers and South Vietnamese soldiers. She saw Ut and cried out, "I want some water, I'm too hot, too hot ...". Ut gave her water, poured more water over her burns, then picked her up and took her to his car and drove about 10 miles to Cu Chi hospital in an attempt to save her life.
Ut begged doctors at the busy hospital to help her, which they did. When doctors took the child into surgery, he left the hospital with his film and headed for the AP bureau in Saigon.
In the last days of the Vietnam War, Ut was evacuated when the North Vietnamese overran the country in April 1975. Unable to reach Phuc, he flew out of Vietnam to the Philippines. Eventually he ended up in a Vietnamese refugee camp on a Marine base in California until AP reassigned him to the Tokyo bureau. After two years there he came back to Los Angeles where he's worked for AP as a general assignment news photojournalist since 1977.
Phuc and Ut stayed in touch over the years. In 1986 the Vietnamese government gave her permission to study pharmacology in Cuba. In 1989, Phuc and Ut were reunited in Havana. While in Cuba she met and married fellow Vietnamese student Bui Huy Toan. After a honeymoon in Moscow, they defected while changing planes in Gander, Newfoundland, and with the help of some Quakers they settled in Canada. Now living in Toronto with her husband and two sons (Thomas and Stephen), she works as a Goodwill Ambassador for Peace for UNESCO and has a charity to help the children who are victims of warwar, The Kim Foundation.
The May 6 event at the Omni Hotel in Los Angeles will also honor Paul Pringle of the Los Angeles Times; Terri Vermeulen Keith of City News Service; John Schwada of Fox 11 News; Frank Stoltze of radio station KPCC 89.3; Kevin Roderick of LA Observed; and Thomas Newton and Jim Ewert of the California Newspaper Publishers Association.
The evening includes a silent auction during a cocktail hour before the dinner. Tickets are $80 for members, $90 for non-members, and tables seating 10 are available for $800.
More information about the program is online here.
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