War Photographer: Carol Ann Duffy

• The poem "War Photographer" explores the issues involved in communicating horrible events.

Poet: Carol Ann Duffy

• Carol Ann Duffy (1955-Present) was appointed as Britain’s Poet Laureate and was the first woman to hold the position.
• Born in Glasgow to a working-class Catholic family, she moved to Stafford at age six.
• Began publishing poetry at 15 and entered a relationship with poet Adrian Henri at 16, studying Philosophy at Liverpool University.
• She worked as a poetry critic and lecturer and has received several awards for her work, which often gives voice to the voiceless.

Background

• The poem was inspired by a real-life war photographer friend who captured news in conflict zones.
• Duffy realized the issues involved in communicating horrible events while conversing with her friend.

Summary

• The poem is about a war photographer who has returned to England.
• While developing photographs of war-torn locations, he thinks about the indifference of people looking at his work in Sunday newspapers.

Message

• The poem's message is that people in Britain do not care enough about atrocities happening abroad.

Analysis

• The title indicates a universal depiction of the 'War Photographer' experience.
• The poem consists of four stanzas of six lines each, with rhyming couplets at the end, creating a calm structure that reflects the apathy of newspaper readers.
• The first stanza places the photographer in his darkroom, a safe and familiar place, a sanctuary.
• 'finally' suggests gratitude for retreating from noise, and 'spools of suffering set out' uses sibilance.
• The “ordered rows” suggest that the photographer observes the pain of war but is not a part of it.
• The red light in the darkroom symbolizes danger transformed into something gentle and appealing.
• A simile compares the darkroom to a church where the photographer is like a priest communicating Christ’s suffering.
• Developing pictures is like a priest reminding his congregation of Christ's sacrifice.
• The names Belfast, Beirut, and Phnom Penh allude to the horrors that have occurred in the world.
• The phrase ‘all flesh is grass’ from the Old Testament book of Isaiah means human beings are fragile and will die.

Stanza 2

• The photographer has ‘a job to do’, developing film and risking his life to take pictures.
• Sibilance is used again in ‘solutions slop in trays’, referring to chemicals and answers contained ‘beneath his hands’.
• The photographer shakes as he watches horrible images appear, but ‘did not tremble’ when taking the pictures.
• Juxtaposition of ‘Rural England’ with war zones highlights the safety of the countryside.
• ‘Home’ is a place of ‘ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel’, unlike war zones, and the fields ‘don’t explode’.
• War contrasts to ‘fields which don’t explode’, alluding to Nick Ut’s Vietnam war photograph to emphasize the difference between children in war zones and rural England.

Stanza 3

• The photograph of a stranger’s face is becoming visible, ‘a half-formed ghost’, capturing them after death.
• The photographer remembers ‘the cries of this man's wife’ and sought ‘approval without words to do what someone must’.
• He wants permission to photograph the man's dying moments, justifying it because it's important to record events to stop the suffering.
• The photographer is reminded of ‘how the blood stained into foreign dust’, emphasizing the lasting meaning of the photograph.

Stanza 4

• The photographs depict ‘A hundred agonies in black and white’, but the ‘editor will pick out five or six’ for ‘Sunday's supplement’.
• ‘The readers eyeballs prick with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers’ suggests fleeting upset without changing lives.
• The poem concludes with the photographer going to another warzone ‘From the aeroplane’ and ‘stares impassively’ at England.
• The readers ‘do not care’ because their comfortable lives in England lack empathy.
• The poem suggests suffering is ignored and concludes with a bleak ending emphasizing the lack of empathy and inaction towards suffering due to comfortable lives in England.