War photographer

• A war photographer contemplates his job whilst developing their photos.
• The public does not care about the issues the photographer is trying to shed light on.
• The poem begins in a darkroom where a man is alone, developing his photos.
• The photographer sees his photos come into focus and remembers the suffering of his subjects.
• The photographer expresses a sense of vocation.
• The photographer realises that the photo will only affect the reader momentarily.
• The setting changes from the darkroom to an aeroplane where the photographer stares impassively out the window, reflecting on the indifference of the English people.
• Carol Ann Duffy was the UK's Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2019 and is friends with two famous war photographers, which is why she is interested in the difficulties and responsibilities posed by their role.
• The poem was published in 1985, ten years after the end of the Vietnam war.
• A contemporary reader would be aware that the line "running children in a nightmare heat" is a reference to a famous photo of a girl in a napalm attack.
• The photo of the girl in a napalm attack had a large impact on the public who protested and campaigned against the war.
• War photography is largely ignored by society today.
• In his darkroom, the photographer is finally alone with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.
• The photographer is developing photos in a darkroom, but the implicit meaning is that he is trying to offer solutions to the conflicts that he witnesses by raising public awareness of them, an awareness that might in turn lead to the public putting pressure on their government to help end them.
• The photographer is compared to "a priest preparing to impart mass" which reminds the listener of the Christian value of peace but is in opposition to the descriptions of violence also featured in the poem.
• In War Photographer, the harsh reality of war is shown in the description of "running children in a nightmare heat" and "blood stained into foreign dust".
• The painful connotations of "twist" in "a stranger's features…twist before his eyes" show the pain the images capture as well as the painful memories they induce in the photographer.
• The photographer feels a sense of duty towards the victims of war he documents.
• The only light in the darkroom is red and softly glows, as though this were a church and he a priest preparing to intone a Mass.
• The sibilant alliteration in "solutions slop in trays" highlights the phrase's significance.
• The tone of the poem is angry, with the collective pronoun "they" creating an accusatory tone which could invoke feelings of guilt in the reader.
• The photographer's role allows him to preserve the memory of those who have died, reflected in the paradoxical metaphor "half formed ghost".
• There is a juxtaposition throughout the poem between lexis from the semantic field of violence and religious imagery to suggest that people are not doing enough to prevent war.
• Tennyson glorifies war through the grand religious imagery in "Into the valley of death".
• The photographer has a job to do.
• Solutions slop in trays beneath the photographer's hands, which did not tremble then but seem to now.
• The photographer is relieved to be in England away from the threat of violence.
• The photographer’s sense of the readers’ indifference contrasts with the firm sense of vocation that he expresses earlier, and the religious simile in the first stanza that suggests his work is as important as a priest’s.
• In 'rural England', problems are trivial and a sunny day can make it all better, contrasting with the wartorn settings the man has been in, where pain, both emotional and physical, is devastating.
• The man is a 'half-formed ghost' in that his image has not yet fully appeared on the photo paper, and the phrase also alludes to the fact that he has died.
• The poem is written in the third person despite it describing an emotionally fraught moment for the man, reflecting the feelings of detachment the photographer experiences at the scenes of conflict, which allow him to continue with his job.
• The photographer may feel relief at his distance from the 'hundred agonies' of the conflict zones, but also feels alienated from and disgusted by the English people, who live frivolously 'baths and pre-lunch beers' and are indifferent to the horrors taking place abroad, on 'foreign dust'.
• The simile that compares the photographer to 'a priest preparing to impart a mass' suggests his work is duty-bound to connect people at home to those suffering in a war.
• The poem describes a man with business to complete, reinforced by the businesslike tone created by the monosyllables and the short sentence.
• The poet references various conflicts: the Troubles in Ireland, the Siege of Beirut (part of the Lebanese Civil War), and the Cambodian Civil War.
• The speaker sets himself off from the British public by the use of the accusatory pronoun 'they'.
• The photographer believes it is important to document conflict, despite the agonies of war being curated for the Sunday supplementary papers.
• Sibilance is used in the poem to develop the harsh atmosphere.
• The poem ends by describing the photographer returning to the warzone he came from on the aeroplane, creating a sense of futile repetition and continuation of past mistakes.
• The photographer can only stare 'impassively' at the country that is presumably his homeland.