War Photographer

• 2 quotes from war photographer:

  • “editor will pick out five or six”
  • “Half-formed ghost”
• themes:

  • guilt
  • loss
  • absence
  • death
  • patriotism
  • impacts of war
• summary:

  photographer returns after taking pics of war and faces psychological hallucinations and mental fragility of war
• who wrote WP?


  duffy
• structure:

  • cyclical structure= starts with him in dark room and ends with him back on a plane to another country facing war= perpetual suffering
• "half-formed ghost"

  • "strangers" = implying some kind of dehumanisation maybe and a distance between the subject and the photographer
  • ghost= of this memory is inescapable. perhaps just like the image, the war photographers feelings and emotions are "half-formed"
  • "twist"= makes the process seem uncomfortable and almost painful; some kind of torture for the subject
  • half-formed = existing in an uncomfortable liminal space almost like a form of purgatory.
• "spools of suffering"

  • lit= spools of suffering are ordered in rows in order to organise them
  • image is a metaphor for the WPS futile desires for "order" stability and tranquility in his "dark" unstable thoughts
  • ordered rows= reminds us of the excessively ordered rows of marching soldiers or maybe even war graves
  • D uses "spools" in "ordered rows" = demonstrate how war is haunting and creates futile desires
  • sibilant "s" = demonstrates the way that wars impact, like the "S" sound itself, is infinite and inescapable
• comparison:

  • kamikaze
  • remains
  • london
  • BC