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Although Ut put down his camera and took Kim Phuc to a hospital, you can't say that the camera was her friend. Hilton, on the other hand, is entirely a creature of the camera -- happily, intentionally, lucratively. She has built her fame by being seen, by being on camera, on television, willing bait for the paparazzi. The camera captured Kim Phuc like a house cat in a bear trap; the camera, in Hilton's case, captured a momentarily distressed woman like a Chihuahua nipping its master.

Seen side by side, these images also raise questions about not just war, but the war we're currently fighting. Ut's earlier photograph wouldn't be controversial today just because of the nudity, but because it can't possibly be read as anything but a powerful indictment of war.

War photographers today, and newspapers that use war images, are hampered by the dangers of working in Iraq and the politicization of the war at home. The new war photography often steers clear of powerful, bloody and unambiguous imagery, in favor of images that come at the horror of war by side channels, showing generic grief, generic destruction, generic traces of blood or physical agony. Ut's photograph was an indelible image of a single, particular girl, in agony; today's war photography tends to capture small crowds of grieving men or women, thronging the site of a car bomb, or the door of a hospital. Their collective keening rarely has the same, full-frontal power of Ut's particular child, naked, wounded and frantic.

President Nixon found Ut's photograph so clearly antiwar that he did the only thing he could, given that he was Nixon and the war was an albatross. He doubted its authenticity.

"I'm wondering if that was fixed," he said, according to the infamous White House tapes.

Kim Phuc brought the war home. The Paris Hilton photograph has no such direct message, but it bears witness to a shocking triviality on what once was called "the home front." It's not uncommon, in the history of war propaganda, to connect images of cherished things at home with the sacrifice asked of soldiers and their families. Think of Norman Rockwell's 1943 series known as "The Four Freedoms," which surveyed icons of the American good life during a time of war. Paris Hilton and her ilk generate an imagery of decadence and foolishness that is all the more glaring because it reminds a nation at war how unequally the sacrifice of war is being borne.

Because Ut took this photograph, because the nation is once again at war, you might imagine that some soldier in Iraq would see the Hilton photo and ask, "This is what we're fighting for?" Or someone conflicted about the war and its outcome might wonder, "Isn't this a ridiculous distraction from serious matters?" The Hilton photograph seen round the world emerged during what may be remembered as the darkest days of the war, when the troop surge seemed to be leading only to more violence. A nation exhausted by four years of repetitive and diluted images of conflict and grief embraced the possibility of changing the subject. We turned the channel, and there she was. From Baghdad weeping to Paris weeping.

Paris Hilton has nothing to do with the war. She is not a cause, or a consequence, or a byproduct, or anything else to do with the war. But in her vapidity, her ridiculousness, her unashamed ignorance and narcissism, she suggests to the world that the values we project through means such as war are not decent, serious values. The image of Kim Phuc said to us, "Here is the war, look at it, it's horrible." The image of Paris Hilton, seen in the context of Ut's earlier photograph, says, "Oh, is there a war on? Really? Like, whatever."

And so Kim Phuc is seen straight on, while Paris looks to the side, captured through glass and glare. They are two human beings so separated by class, privilege, circumstance and time that it's tempting to think that neither one of them could possibly imagine the world of the other. Kim Phuc, whose burns required 14 months of hospitalization and 17 surgical procedures, survived and is now a UNESCO goodwill ambassador living in Canada. Paris Hilton, who was imprisoned for 23 days, survived and is now posing naked and covered in gold paint to advertise her new line of "wine-in-a-can" drinks.

So perhaps we should take these photographs down off the wall, take them away from each other, remove them from their almost insulting proximity. Perhaps they really do have nothing in common except that the same man was behind the camera that captured them.

But there is this: On both the basic, factual level and in a broader, more metaphysical sense, we made them. Kim Phuc's misery was the collateral damage of a war we made. Paris Hilton's vanity and fame and preposterous sense of entitlement is the collateral damage of a society we made. Before filing these two images into their proper categories -- the tragedy of war, the vacuity of the home front -- we should acknowledge the one thing they have in common at the deepest level. We own them, they are us, and they define the odd limits of our silly, foolish, bloody-minded species.