War Photographer by Ms. Duffy

War Photographer by Ms. Duffy

This poem is the only one by Ms. Duffy (in this selection) which is

written in the third person. It is about a person who is clearly not

the poet. The surface subject of the poem is the war photographer of

the title but at a deeper level the poem explores the difference

between "Rural England" and places where wars are fought (Northern

Ireland, the Lebanon and Cambodia), between the comfort or

indifference of the newspaper editor and its readers and the suffering

of the people in the photographs. War Photographer (from Standing

Female Nude, 1985) comes from Duffy's friendship with Don McCullin and

Philip Jones Griffiths, two very well-respected stills photographers

who specialised in war photography. But the photographer in the poem

is anonymous: he could be any of those who record scenes of war. He is

not so much a particular individual as, like the poet, an observer and

recorder of others' lives. He is an outsider ("alone/With spools of

suffering") who moves between two worlds but is comfortable in

neither. The "ordered rows" of film spools may suggest how the

photographer tries to bring order to what he records, to interpret or

make sense of it.

The simile which compares him to a priest shows how seriously he takes

his job, and how (by photographing them) he stands up for those who

cannot help themselves. His darkroom resembles a church in which his

red light is like a coloured lantern (quite common in Catholic and

some Anglican churches). The image is also appropriate because, like a

priest, he teaches how fragile we are and how short life is. ("All

flesh is grass" is a quotation from the Old Testament book of Isaiah.

Isaiah contrasts the shortness of human life with eternal religious

truths - "the Word of the Lord" which "abides forever"). In the poem,

the sentence follows a list of names. These are places where life is

even briefer than normal, because of wars.

The second stanza contrasts the photographer's calmness when taking

pictures with his attitude as he develops them. If his hands shake

when he takes pictures, they won't be any good, but in the darkroom he

can allow his hands to tremble. "Solutions" refers literally to the

developing fluid in the trays, but also suggests the idea of solving

the political problems which cause war - "solutions" which he does not

have, of course. Duffy contrasts the fields in England with those

abroad - as if the photographer thinks English fields unusual for not

being minefields. The image is shocking, because he thinks of land

mines as exploding not under soldiers but under "the feet of running