he earns his living and they do not care.
Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955. She grew up in Staffordshire and went to university in Liverpool. Having spent some time in London as a freelance writer, she now lives in Manchester. She has won many prizes and several awards for her poetry. Her poems, she says, ‘come from my everyday experience, my past/memory and my imagination. People and characters are fascinating to me’. Many of her poems are based on true experiences and real people. In the 1970s Carol Ann Duffy was friendly with Don McCullin, a famous photographer whose photographs of war were widely published and respected. Her poem, “War Photographer”, (from Standing Female Nude, 1985), is based on conversations she had with him.
The poem works on a very personal level – it is based on the authentic experience of a war photographer – and on a much wider level, saying something about the views and attitudes within our society concerning things that happen much further away. People are glad to distance themselves from the harsh realities of war whilst keeping themselves informed of, and superficially sympathetic to these real life situations.
The structure of this poem supports this dichotomy in that there are two contrasting worlds: the world of war zones (“Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh.”) and the calmer world of “Rural England”. The war photographer is the man who goes between these two worlds. The safe world of England is signified by the clichés of a typical Sunday: “The bath and pre-lunch beers” while the horror of war is expressed through much more startling language: “…blood stained into foreign dust.”
Appropriately for a poem connected with a Sunday supplement, colours are important in the poem. The atmosphere of the opening stanza is almost religious, with a biblical quote in line 6: “All flesh is grass”, and the colours contribute to this: “darkroom…the only light is red and softly glows”. The colours move through “the blood” of stanza three to the suitably “black-and-white” of the final stanza’s newsprint.
The poem is not a simple as a criticism of the photographer; as the poet says, “He has a job to do”. The clue that he feels some emotion is in the second stanza where his hands seem to “tremble” as he develops the photographs. In fact, there are three sets of feelings in the poem: the poet’s, the photographer’s, and the readers whose “eyeballs prick with tears…” It is the following line “between the bath and pre-lunch beers” which suggests the poet’s attitude. She seems to be critical of our naïve and superficial responses to international suffering. She also seems to suggest that it is the photographer who feels the most affected and helpless because of the detail in which she describes his responses:
“A stranger’s features
faintly start to twist before his eyes,
a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries
of this man’s wife, how he sought approval
without words to do what someone must.”
The poem is written in the 3rd person and creates a powerful picture of a real photographer: “In his darkroom he is finally alone/ with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.” He has “Solutions…in trays” and an “editor”- a picture full of humanity. The sense of connection in the poem (which the poet seems to suggest we are not sufficiently aware of) is heightened by the enjambement within each stanza:
“Home again
to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel,
to fields which don’t explode beneath the feet
of running children in a nightmare heat.”
Rhyming couplets within the stanzas also add to this. They appear normally in the second and third line, and in the last two lines: “…rows…glows”, “…Mass…grass”.
The last line of the poem – a stark juxtaposition - seems to focus the reader’s thoughts on the dilemma posed by war reporting: “he earns his living and they do not care.”
In my view, Duffy is siding with the photographer in the poem. While many people would think it inhumane to take pictures of suffering and death whilst not attempting to help the subjects, she portrays him as a man with feelings, who have forced himself to do his job “impassively”. Who is it, she wonders, who is inhumane? The photographer or the reader?