AQA Power and Conflict: 'War Photographer'

'War Photographer' is from Carol Ann Duffy's striking first collection of poetry Standing Female Nude (Anvil, 1985). It is a piece which, like may of Duffy's poems, seeks to look below the surface of a situation, and examine the feelings hidden beneath the faces that people present to the world. It also, like many poems in the collection (including the title piece), is about the interaction of people with art, and what art represents. You may see a text of the poem here.

Although Duffy is famous for her use of the dramatic monologue, this poem, which could so easily have been written as a monologue, instead is written in the third person, which gives it some distance--arguably, the same distance of which the poem speaks between creator and observer. However, it uses an omniscient tone which apparently allows us to see into the photographer's thoughts and feelings.

Street execution of a Viet Cong Prisoner, Saigon, 1968

The poem explores the idea of how a war photographer, a bystander to atrocity, yet manages to take pictures without being devastated by what he does. The origins of the poem apparently lie in Duffy's friendship with the photographers Don McCullin and Philip Jones Griffiths, and in their discussion with her about their work (there's an interesting interview with McCullin here which gives a sense of what he went through). In an interview, Carol Ann Duffy said how interested she was in the idea of a war photographer as opposed to the photos he might take: ‘in the dilemma of someone who has that as a job... to go to these places and come back with the images.'

War photography has long posed a moral dilemma. There are some shocking photographs of war atrocities which seem to demand of the reader 'how could someone record this and not intervene?' Of course, most of the time the answer is evident. One would not intervene in an execution in a hostile country, for instance, for fear of being executed oneself. Yet to film that execution still seems to make the photographer complicit with what is done. In the online comments for the interview with McCullin above, one commentator says about the 81-year old McCullin, apparently without irony 'I tend to think the honourable way out for a war photographer is to die on the front line. Otherwise it is ghastly exploitation'. 

The poem describes the photographer carrying out his work, developing photographs, and remembering what happened in each case. The narrative suggests that the photographer feels that what he does is in some senses a sacred duty—something that must be done, although he finds it personally painful. His role in recording the images of war is a task that he feels ‘someone must’ do in order to publicise the atrocities being committed.

The poem is written in sestets of roughly equal length—mostly iambic, and many lines in pentameter, though not consistently. The regular rhyme-scheme, ABBCDD, avoids resolution with the A and C rhymes left unmatched, —something that seems to echo the war photographer’s own sense of turmoil, even as the sestets suggest how he seeks to impose calm on this feeling. The unpartnered end-words , however, often find internal echoes if not end-rhyme. For instance the assonantal rhyme between ‘alone’ and ‘intone’ or ‘tears’ and ‘beers’ further help to bind the poem together. The use of enjambement helps to create a conversational tone, which de-emphasises the rhymes as well, making the couplet rhymes subtly emphatic.

In the first stanza, we are presented with the picture of the photographer in his darkroom, ‘finally alone’, with the emphasis on ‘finally’ suggesting that for him this is a place of refuge from other people. The space is implicitly calm, as rolls of film become metonymic ‘spools of suffering’, the alliteration emphasising the contrast between the controlled ‘order’ which arranges them, and the agony which engendered them. The language of the poem suggests a semantic field of religion, with the photographer’s ritual of developing film (this is of course set in a pre-digital age) compared to the ritual of a priest saying Mass. 

In a dark-room, in order to protect light-sensitive film as it is developed, the only light which can be used is red light. Duffy was raised as a Catholic, and in a Catholic Church, a red light by the altar indicates the presence of the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle—the body of Christ. This is significant, as it suggests that the work that the photographer does, in revealing suffering to people in order to create compassion (‘passion’ itself means suffering of course) is analogous to the role of the priest in revealing Christ to people. The extended simile which compares him to a priest suggests the seriousness of his work, and echoes of the Bible emphasise this impression. The quotation from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah ‘All flesh is grass’ is often used as a commonplace to indicate that all are subject to death. Here, it suggests the universality of the experiences that the photographer has had in the different locations named, its passive acceptance at odds with the horror of the conflicts. 

The three sites which Duffy names here were all locations of significant conflict when she wrote the poem--and all, interestingly, examples of civil conflict, where the people concerned were in dispute with others of their own country. In Belfast, the ongoing violent civil war between republicans and loyalists was known as The Troubles. You can find out more about it in detail here on the BBC website.  In Beirut, the Siege of Beirut had started in 1982, when Israeli troops invaded Lebanon to attack the PLO. Between 15,000-20,000 people are estimated to have been killed, mainly civilians. Phnom Penh probably refers to the Cambodian Genocide which took place between 1975-9. In all these locations, the war photographer would have seen horrific injustice and cruelty.

The short, almost clipped sentences (‘he has a job to do’, ‘something is happening’) suggest the photographer has only a brittle control over his emotions. In the second stanza the process of developing film by putting the paper of the photographs into trays of developing and fixing solution is described. The use of the word 'solutions' here is ironic--the developing of the photographs is in one sense a 'solution' for the imperative 'he has a job to do'. The solutions are also the dissolved chemicals in liquids he uses to achieve this. His hands tremble as he develops the photographs--perhaps in anticipation of what he will see.  

The contrast between 'Rural England' and the locations at which he has taken the photographs is powerful, with the image of exploding fields maiming children perhaps recalling one of the most famous war photographs of all time--that taken by Nick Ut of the nine-year old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running from a napalm attack which had burned off her clothes. This kind of agony is contrasted with the 'ordinary pain' which, it is implied, a sunny day can cheer. The distance between the experience of England and the war zones which he covers is vast, and is in some ways a recreation of one of the most famous war poems of all time, Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’.

In Brooke's sonnet, which opens 'If I should die, think only this of me', he describes how he may, as a soldier, one day lie dead in a 'foreign field' which he will somehow make 'forever' English through his presence. He imagines an ‘English heaven’ whose imperialist expectations are opposed to the ‘foreign dust’ with which he will mingle. A similar opposition here suggests that those in ‘rural England’ drinking beer (rather than Brooke's tea) are equally detached from the realities of war, and do not realise the visceral horror of 'how the blood stained into foreign dust'. However, instead of being reassured that this world of peace exists, the protagonist  of 'War Photographer' seems increasingly disturbed by the disjunction between his work and the 'home' to which he returns. 

The poem takes us through the stages of the photograph developing, with the features of this man appearing slowly in stanza three through the developing solution like ‘a half-formed ghost’. The simile becomes real as the man is also a ghost in the sense that he is dead and yet his death is still haunting the photographer, his features 'twisted' in remembered agony as well as in the process of development. The photographer's need for 'approval' from the man's wife to film him plays on the sense of the use of the word 'approval' for consent--it is the same word as the one used for when pictures are selected by an editor of a newspaper. The use of  'foreign dust' is powerfully ironic in its reference to Brooke, as the photographer seeks to create a universal world of shared feeling, pleading 'without words' (perhaps referencing the language barrier and/or the impossibility of speaking to someone in such pain) for permission to film a dying man. 

Throughout the poem, phrases such as 'he has a job to do', 'to do what someone must' show how the photographer feels his work to be a duty. Nonetheless, his feelings about his employment are complex. He knows that although his photos are significant, that they may not always be treated as significant. The editor will select only some out of hundreds, and so cannot hope to tell the full story of the experience. The photos chosen will be part of the 'supplement' of the newspaper (the sunday colour supplement magazine) but not actually front page news--this choice implies that they are not being taken as seriously as the photographer would like. Ultimately, the photographs may have an effect on the readers of the papers, but only as part of their Sunday morning routines; there is little certainty about how profound or lasting this impact will be as they move on to their ‘pre-lunch beers’. The sight of the photographs may move the paper's readers, but it will  not change their lives, or disturb them.

As the poem proceeds, the photographer seems to come to a sense of heightened clarity about his role—even as the readers see his pictures, he will be heading off to take more—and his ’impassive’ stare from the aircraft towards the war zone seems to both mimic and criticize the detachment of the English public towards his pictures. The poem ends finally with a sense that ‘they do not care’; that nothing, no matter how horrific, is sufficient to disturb the comfort of the quiet ‘rural England’ to which he has returned.