NASHVILLE — On June 8, 1972, Nick Ut, a Vietnamese photographer working for The Associated Press, shot a now-iconic photo of children fleeing napalm mistakenly dropped on their village by South Vietnamese forces. At the center of the photo is a naked 9-year-old girl named Phan Thi Kim Phuc. She is in agony; her skin appears to be melting. None of the helmeted soldiers in the background are looking at the children. Only the photographer sees her pain.

Now we all see her pain. The photo, which was published by The Times and other newspapers three days later, shocked readers with its clarion depiction of the costs of war. The photo won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Later that year, U.S. forces withdrew from Vietnam. Whether or not the photo is directly related to the withdrawal, at the very least it fed the growing antiwar sentiment in this country and may have hastened the end of the war.

“Napalm Girl” belongs to a tradition of photojournalism that furthers the cause of social justice. There’s David Jackson’s 1955 image of 14-year-old Emmett Till in his coffin, murdered for being black in Jim Crow Mississippi. Sam Nzima’s 1976 photo of a teenager carrying a lifeless child in his arms during the Soweto uprising in South Africa. Kevin Carter’s 1993 photo of a starving Sudanese child being watched by a vulture. Nilufer Demir’s 2015 photo of a 3-year-old lying facedown in the surf, drowned with his mother and brother in a desperate attempt to flee the war in Syria. John Moore’s 2018 photo of a terrified 2-year-old Honduran child seeking asylum with her mother at the southern U.S. border. These photographs clarify a particular cultural moment; they distill the vast churn of history into a single image so searing it returns in your dreams to make you weep in the dark.