The Full Text of “War Photographer”
The Full Text of “War Photographer”
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“War Photographer” Introduction
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"War Photographer" is a poem by Scottish writer Carol Ann Duffy, the United Kingdom's poet laureate from 2009 to 2019. Originally published in 1985, "War Photographer" depicts the experiences of a photographer who returns home to England to develop the hundreds of photos he has taken in an unspecified war zone. The photographer wrestles with the trauma of what he has seen and his bitterness that the people who view his images are unable to empathize fully with the victims of catastrophic violence abroad. The poem references a number of major historical air strikes and clearly draws imagery from Nick Ut's famous Vietnam War photograph of children fleeing the devastation of a napalm bomb.
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“War Photographer” Summary
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The photographer is alone in his dark room, with all his photographic film from the war lined up in neat rows. A red light softly illuminates the dark room, making it feel as if it were church and as if the photographer were a priest getting ready to perform the Catholic Mass. In that Mass, the priest might list the names of war-torn cities. Everyone dies eventually, their bodies returning to earth.
The photographer must do his job. Even though his hands never shook while working the war zone, the photographer's hands seem to shake now while he develops his photographs. He is in rural England. Here at home once again in England, all suffering is minor and temporary, alleviated by the weather. Unlike in the war zone, rural England doesn't get bombed while children flee from horrific fires.
The photographs are starting to develop. A man's distorted face comes into view, bringing to mind a fading memory for the photographer. The photographer remembers the dying man's wife screaming, and he remembers silently asking to do what he had to do: to take the photograph of the dying man as that man bled out on the ground in a foreign country.
He has hundreds of black and white photographs that depict the horrors of war, but his editor will only use five or six in the Sunday edition of the newspaper. The readers will be momentarily emotional when they see the pictures in the paper, which they'll look at mid-morning—in the time between taking baths and having some drinks before lunch. The photographer looks blankly from the airplane at the war zone where he makes his money, a place that the readers do not care about.
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“War Photographer” Themes
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Apathy, Empathy, and the Horrors of War
“War Photographer” describes the titular photographer’s experience of developing photos taken in war-torn lands. The poem centers on the tension between the all-encompassing sorrow and horror that the photographer experiences as he looks through the photographs and the casual, temporary sympathy with which he knows his viewers will engage with these images. The poem criticizes those viewers for their failure to grasp the enormity of war, but, at the same time, it also suggests that the photographer’s empathy comes primarily from witnessing war first-hand. Through this contrast, the poem indicates that direct experience of atrocities like these may be the only remedy for such apathy.
The speaker establishes the contrast between the war-torn setting of the photographer’s work and the peace and safety of rural England, where the photographer actually lives. In England, “ordinary pain” can simply be dispelled by the weather. In England, there will be no mass destruction of the natural world nor threats to the community’s children. These details underscore the fact that the war photographer's images will be seen primarily by people whose lives are drastically different from those of the images' subjects—by people for whom the scale and horror of war are so far removed from their own experience that it is perhaps incomprehensible.
Meanwhile, the photographer’s deep empathy with the subjects of his photographs clearly stems from the feelings of danger and terror that he experienced in that space of war. In the third stanza, for example, the photographer recalls the horror of seeing a man dying in front of his wife. The photographer’s awareness of the wife’s suffering in this moment—he can still hear her cries in the present—demonstrates that he has left his time in the war zone with an empathetic understanding of the experiences of the war’s victims. The collection of photos that he will submit to his editor are a “hundred agonies in black and white,” each representing a personal engagement with human suffering that still reverberates powerfully for the photographer.
The final stanza returns to the other figures who will engage with the photographs. First, the photographer’s editor will “pick out five or six” images from these “hundred agonies.” In other words, the editor will reduce the incomprehensible hugeness of war, a scale that the photographer has felt firsthand, to a size that the general public can comprehend. The editor’s work distances the photographs’ viewers from the overwhelming reality of war.
When the general public then encounters these five or six photos, the speaker predicts, the readers’ “eyeballs [will] prick with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers.” This reaction indicates a fleeting, surface-level compassion for the subjects of the images. In the moment of looking at the images, viewers will feel sympathy for the victims of these horrors, but they will not be moved to take action or even to remember what they have seen as they go about their days. The photographer knows that those baths and beers are a world apart from the daily lives and suffering of those people in the photographs. As the final line of the poem summarizes, bluntly, the viewers “do not care.”
However, the poem suggests that these people “do not care” because they have no real way of understanding the depth and breadth of the wars. The whole point of the photographer’s job is to help them gain that understanding, but when it comes down to it, only he experiences the third stanza’s flashbacks, which go far beyond what is depicted in the photos. Only he has felt first-hand the disparity between life in England and life at war.
And ultimately, it is the photographer, not the uncaring public, who “stares impassively” at the war zone: as powerful as the images are for him, he and his photos are nevertheless powerless to make his viewers share that empathy. In its conclusion, the poem questions whether anything but first-hand experience is enough to move people to action against atrocities. And even that first-hand experience, the final "impassive" stare suggests, may be so overwhelming that it leaves people like the war photographer hopeless—resigned to his inability to do anything to affect the situation he documents.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Line 1
- Line 2
- Line 6
- Lines 7-9
- Lines 9-12
- Lines 13-15
- Lines 15-18
- Lines 19-24
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Trauma and Memory
“War Photographer” presents a humanizing portrait of the victims of the war as well as of the foreign survivors, like the photographer, who depart from their experiences in a war zone permanently changed. The war photographer’s images become not just an archive of the conflict but a collection of triggers for deeper, multi-sensory flashbacks that take the photographer back to each photographic incident. Through the war photographer’s experiences, the poem suggests that war’s traumatic effects extend far beyond the actual sites of conflict.
Throughout the second stanza, the speaker slowly reveals glimpses of the photographer’s fragility that suggest he cannot escape what he has witnessed. For instance, his hands now tremble as he does his work, despite being far from danger. The juxtapositions of the images of rural England and the photographer’s memories, preserved in his images, further suggest the frequency of the photographer’s flashbacks to these horrors. The thought of England’s fields, for example, triggers a memory of the destruction of a landscape and of children under attack. In other words, the photographer carries the memories of war with him back to quiet England.
The third stanza seems to depict, with its opening, arresting sentence, “Something is happening,” a more significant moment of post-traumatic flashback. The facial features of dying subject in one of the war photographer’s images “faintly start to twist before his eyes.” As the photograph comes into focus in the dark room solution, so too does the memory come into focus for the war photographer. The poem plays with this in-between space in which these images are part-memory, part-half-developed-photograph, “a half-formed ghost.” Memories from the war are effectively haunting the photographer.
The third stanza then concludes with a series of details that the war photographer recalls from taking the photo that has triggered this sea of memories. These memories are at once aural (the cries of the dying man’s wife), personal to his own intent in the remembered moment (seeking the wife’s approval to take the photo), and visual (the man’s blood on the ground). This cascade of memory stems from the development of the photograph, but none of these aspects of the memory—what it sounded like, what happened just outside the frame, and what the photographer did behind the camera—have been captured or can be shared. Each image, then, triggers a sensory overload that refreshes the photographer’s visceral awareness of the aural, visual, and personal—maybe even moral—horror of the war. As far away from the site of conflict as the photographer may be, the traumatic impact of the war remains with him.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 3-6
- Line 7
- Lines 7-9
- Lines 9-10
- Lines 11-12
- Lines 13-18
- Line 19
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The Ethics of Documenting War
In addition to criticizing viewers who look at images of suffering and do nothing about it, the poem also raises the subtler moral issue of whether the photographer’s work is moral in itself. Throughout the poem, the photographer attempts to justify the necessity and moral importance of his own work, even as he himself enjoys the safety and freedom of returning home to peaceful England. By posing these challenging questions, the poem pushes readers to confront whether, and under what conditions, the war photographer’s work is ethical.
“War Photographer” most potently references the photographer’s relationship to the victims of war in the third stanza. The photographer remembers “how he sought approval / without words to do what someone must” from the wife of a man who was bleeding out on the ground. Instead of seeking to aid the man, the photographer did what he believed “someone must”: document this moment on camera. Tellingly, the photographer does not suggest that he actually got approval from the man’s wife to take this image, nor does he offer explicit justification for why this documentation must be done. At the time, the photographer simply took these photos with confidence—his hands “did not tremble then.” But it seems that, in the safety of “Rural England,” he has begun to question the ethical validity of his work, as his hands now “seem to” tremble.
The references to “running children in a nightmare heat” have also often led readers of “War Photographer” to connect Duffy’s poem with “The Terror of War,” a famous photograph of the Vietnam War by photographer Nick Ut that depicts a young girl fleeing naked from the raging fireballs of a napalm strike. In a section of the photograph that was initially cropped and unprinted, Ut captures a second photographer who studies his camera intently as the children run by him, helpless and terrified. In this wordless indictment of the photographer in the frame, Ut also draws attention to the dubious morality of his own work behind the camera: should he be helping the children instead of simply documenting their suffering? (Though notably, Ut did help the young girl in the photograph get medical treatment.) By alluding to this famous example of morally fraught war photography, the poem implies that the titular photographer’s morality might be uncertain as well.
The poem consistently positions the war photographer as a man doing his work: “He has a job to do,” the reader is told. This is how he “earns his living.” Yet so much of the work that the war photographer does is for naught: only five or six of every hundred images will appear in print. Why must someone record images of suffering that will never reach the general public? If the reason why “someone must” do this work is not to effect understanding and change in the viewers of the photograph, then what is it? And is it ethical for the photographer and his employer to profit from images of suffering if they’re not doing anything to alleviate that suffering?
The poem raises the quandary of whether the viewers’ ultimate apathy towards these images invalidates the morality that the war photographer sees in his work. If he is not making a difference with his photography, not inspiring widespread action that will actually help the subjects of the photos or people like them, then, perhaps, the photographs have no ethical reason to exist.
Taken a step further, can any documentation of war, photographic or otherwise, be ethical? Will a poet's description of scenes of war, depicted here by Duffy through the lens of a photographer's camera, inspire the change she might intend? Could there something morally questionable, an ethical gray area in using the stories, partially imagined, partially real, of victims of war in "War Photographer" itself?
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-6
- Line 7
- Lines 7-9
- Lines 11-12
- Lines 13-15
- Lines 15-18
- Lines 19-24
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “War Photographer”
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Lines 1-2
In his dark ...
... in ordered rows.In the opening lines of "War Photographer," the speaker conjures an image of the title figure working alone in his dark room to develop his pictures. Without the context provided by the title of the poem, a reader might struggle to understand who the man is and what he is doing. Throughout the poem, Duffy plays with the juxtaposing forces of order and chaos: the title, for example, is the poem's first organizing factor, lending readers a helping hand in understanding the poem's subject that the text itself might not provide.
The first line ends with a sense of the photographer's isolation ("he is finally alone"), but the enjambment allows for a slight surprise at the start of the next line: he is not alone all by himself, but, rather, he is alone"with" the photographs he has taken. The safety and security proffered in the opening line get snatched by the second line's conjunction "with." Much like being alone with a monster, being alone and being alone "with" are drastically different experiences.
The images and word choice of the opening lines also play with multiple meanings. "Dark room," of course, literally describes the photographer's work space, but the darkness also foreshadows the photographer's despair and sense of being lost, though back at home in England. The "ordered rows" (line 2) of photographic film also bring to mind the image of a cemetery, signaling how readily the photographer's thoughts return to the tragedy he has witnessed.
The most heightened words in these first lines are "spools of suffering" (line 2), the description of the cylinders of photographic film containing images of the war zone and the violence the photographer has documented. The sibilance (spools of suffering set out) emphasizes this image. The photographer cannot help but see suffering in his craft now. The very tools of his trade have become intertwined with the atrocities he has captured on film. It seems pertinent, too, that the word "spool," when used as a verb, can mean both "wind"and its antonym, "unwind." The real, live suffering of human beings has been bottled up by the photographer's lens into these small cylinders, but, seen through the photographer's eyes, they unwind back into life-size memory, not just images but triggers for memories of the real people and real horror depicted.
Dissecting these lines on a formal level, lines 1-2 do not clearly capture the sturdiness of the iambic meter (da DUM) that will shape most of the poem's rhythms. Instead, the poem opens with an anapest (da da DUM) before a series of iambs, as if the photographer is tripping into the dark room before steadying himself:
In his dark | room he | is fi- | nally | alone
with spools | of suf- | fering | set out | in ord- | ered rowsThis opening metrical moment immediately establishes the threat of unsteadiness—trauma, perhaps—that will permeate the entire poem.
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Lines 3-5
The only light ...
... intone a Mass. -
Line 6
Belfast. Beirut. Phnom ... flesh is grass.
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Lines 7-9
He has a ...
... seem to now. -
Lines 9-10
Rural England. Home ...
... weather can dispel, -
Lines 11-12
to fields which ...
... a nightmare heat. -
Lines 13-15
Something is happening. ...
... a half-formed ghost. -
Lines 15-18
He remembers the ...
... into foreign dust. -
Lines 19-21
A hundred agonies ...
... for Sunday’s supplement. -
Lines 21-22
The reader’s eyeballs ...
... and pre-lunch beers. -
Lines 23-24
From the aeroplane ...
... do not care.
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“War Photographer” Symbols
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Photographs
The present-day action of "War Photographer" finds the title character of the poem developing photographs he has taken during his time in a war zone. In the second stanza, the poem describes his process briefly, referencing how the "solutions slop in trays beneath his hands" (lines 7-8). Over the course of the poem, it begins to become clear that the development of photographs both symbolizes and literally triggers the traumatic flashbacks that the photographer experiences. Throughout the poem, then, the photographer's art comes to represent the experience of traumatic memory.
In lines 13-15, the "stranger's features" twisting "before his eyes, / a half-formed ghost" simultaneously depict the developing photograph coming into focus and the photographer's memory of the events that led to the creation of that image. Although it is the actual development of the photograph that leads the photographer to recall the violent memory, the process of developing a photograph also stands in for the process of drawing a memory to mind through a flashback: a photograph, like a memory, begins stored away. It swirls and blurs as it comes into greater focus, and, ultimately, becomes entirely visible and clear.Throughout the poem, then, the photographer's art comes to represent the experience, one not exclusive to photographers, of traumatic memory.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 2: “with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows”
- Line 7: “Solutions slop in trays”
- Lines 13-15: “A stranger’s features / faintly start to twist before his eyes, / a half-formed ghost”
- Line 19: “A hundred agonies in black and white”
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“War Photographer” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
The use of alliteration in "War Photographer" is particularly prevalent in the opening stanza. Note, for instance, the "spools of suffering set out in ordered rows" (line 2) and the alliterative list of cities affected by bombing atrocities: "Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh" (line 6). There is a chant-like quality to the density of alliteration in the opening lines of the poem, sounds repeating again and again. The use of alliteration in the opening stanza also lends the lines rhetorical power when read aloud. This, in turn, strengthens the image of a "priest preparing" an effective sermon (line 5).
While alliteration is less prevalent as the poem continues, the final stanza also gains intensity through the sibilance of the editor selecting from the photographer's images "five or six for Sunday's supplement" (line 21), and the rough /b/ sounds of "between the bath and pre-lunch beers" (line 22). In the first example, the trio of /s/ sounds convey the editor's snake-like slickness in selecting the images; there is little emotion there, little care for the "agonies" that the photos portray. In the second example, the barrage of /b/ sounds seem to emphasize the bitterness of the speaker and photographer in reflecting upon the apathy of the viewers. They add a bouncy, sing-song quality to the phrase that suggests how frivolous and fleeting the viewers' sympathy is.
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 2: “s,” “s,” “s”
- Line 4: “th,” “th”
- Line 5: “pr,” “pr”
- Line 6: “B,” “B,” “P,” “P”
- Line 7: “H,” “h,” “S,” “s”
- Line 8: “h,” “h,” “th”
- Line 9: “th”
- Line 13: “S,” “s,” “t,” “f”
- Line 14: “f,” “s,” “t,” “t,” “t”
- Line 16: “h,” “h”
- Line 17: “w,” “w,” “w”
- Line 20: “s”
- Line 21: “S,” “s”
- Line 22: “b,” “b,” “b”
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Allusion
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Aphorism
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Assonance
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Caesura
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Consonance
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End-Stopped Line
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Enjambment
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Metaphor
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Parallelism
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Simile
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"War Photographer" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Dark room
- Spools
- Mass
- Belfast
- Beirut
- Phnom Penh
- "All flesh is grass"
- Solutions
- Dispel
- Sunday's supplement
- Impassively
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(Location in poem: Line 1: “dark room”)
A photographer's dark room is the space in which prints can be developed from photographic film. In "War Photographer," the phrase "dark room" is literally the photographer's work space but also suggests the layers of metaphorical darkness and isolation surrounding the photographer's work.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “War Photographer”
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Form
Formally, "War Photographer" is comprised of four six-line stanzas with a consistent rhyme scheme. There is no variation from this basic structure across the poem. Within each stanza, though, Duffy plays surprisingly with meter, internal rhyme, sentence structure, and enjambment, but these sometimes jolting shifts never interfere with the larger stanza-level shape of the poem. It is as if, from the outside, the photographer's life in rural England looks normal: he goes about his day and "he has a job to do" (line 7). Inside, however, at the level of the thought, the moment, the memory, the photographer is suffering from tremendous psychic trauma.
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Meter
The meter of "War Photographer" is predominantly iambic (meaning its poetic feet have two syllables in an unstressed-stressed pattern). Several lines are in perfect iambic pentameter (meaning there are five iambs—da DUM units—per line), like line 3:
The on- | ly light | is red | and soft- | ly glows
Other iambic lines take on other numbers of feet like line 4 (iambic tetrameter, meaning there are four iambs per line), line 7 (iambic hexameter, meaning there are six iambs), and line 10 (iambic heptameter, which has an impressive seven iambs!). While the number of feet is not consistent, the iambic rhythm usually is, suggesting, perhaps, that the photographer is doing the best he can to keep putting one foot in front of the other, so to speak, in his newly secure life.
The use of two trochaic feet (feet with a stressed-unstressed syllable pattern) in the middle of line 9 on the words "Rural England" feels like a long inhalation, an attempt of the photographer to persuade himself that he is okay:
though seem | to now. | Rural | England.
The meter is thrown off entirely, though, by the invasion of two dactyls (a three-syllable foot with a stressed-unstressed-unstressed pattern) at the start of line 13, when the photographer's flashback fully kicks in:
Something is | happening. | A stran- | ger's fea- | tures.
Although the line recovers its meter here (ending with an extra unstressed syllable), the rest of the third stanza struggles to maintain its iambic sturdiness, with each line veering away from iambs slightly, until righting themselves at line 18:
and how | the blood | stained in- | to for- | eign dust.
The general aura of iambic straightforwardness with stomach-churning turns away from that steady meter capture the poem's overall depiction of the unexpected and jolting nature of trauma.
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Rhyme Scheme
The rhyme scheme of each stanza in "War Photographer" is:
ABBCDD
This pattern remains consistent throughout all four stanzas, and the rhymes are almost all perfect. What is variable, however, is the use of internal rhyme within the stanzas. Internal rhyme appears first in the opening stanza with the rhyme "were a church" (line 4), followed by the second syllable of Belfast (line 6) echoing with the end rhyme between "Mass" and "grass."
Rhyme within the lines pick up steam in the final stanza with the end rhyme of "six" and "prick" (lines 20-21) mirrored in the word "pick" in line 20. Line 22's last word, "beers," which is unrhymed as per the rhyme scheme still has a rhyme within the line with "tears": "tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers." The final couplet, "where"/"care" (lines 23-24), finds a third rhyme in the first syllable of "aeroplane" in line 23.
How to account for this accelerated rhyme? It seems significant that these internal and extra rhymes bubble up in the first and last stanzas, the stanzas least overcome by the photographer's trauma and flashbacks. While the overall rhyme scheme remains sturdy—an overarching normalcy, like the general stanza structure—internal rhyme seems strongest when the photographer's calmer mind matches his exterior. Those internal rhymes indicate a sort of internal logic, an ability for the photographer to think more clearly—and often more bitterly—about his experiences and how his images will be received.
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“War Photographer” Speaker
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In "War Photographer," the speaker is closely aligned with the photographer whose story is being told—a man from rural England who makes his money selling photos of war to a newspaper or magazine. Although the photographer is referred to in third-person, much of the text appears to get inside the photographer's head, sharing his memories and thoughts. Sometimes the distance between the seemingly omniscient speaker and the photographer is unclear: at the end of the first stanza, for example, does the photographer imagine the Mass himself, supplying the sarcastic text ("Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.")? Or does the speaker make the comparison completely separately from the photographer, just as an observer looking in?
What is certain, though, is that the images of the war zone, the photographer's past, are accessible in the poem only through the memories of the photographer. In the third stanza, for example, the image of the dying man and the surrounding sensory details come through the framework of the photographer's flashback ("He remembers the cries...").
What is also clear is that the photographer seems, at times, to believe that his work is moral and meaningful; his hands remain calm while working in the war zone, and he believes he is doing what "must" be done by photographing the dying man in the third stanza. The poem's speaker, if considered a separate observer, seems perhaps less convinced of the value of the photographer's work. At other times, however, the poem creates the sense that the photographer himself doubts the efficacy and ethics of his images (suggesting that perhaps the speaker's doubt is simply meant to be a reflection of the photographer's own, rather than an external judgment). His hands "tremble" as he develops his photographs back home in England, betraying a sense of lasting trauma from all the horror he as witnessed. And he seems bitterly aware that most people seeing his photographs will be moved only momentarily.
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“War Photographer” Setting
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"War Photographer" is set primarily in a photographer's dark room in rural England. The speaker describes the dark room's contents with its spools of photographic film in "ordered rows" (line 2) and its dimly glowing red light.
The photographer's memories, however, transport the reader away from the dark room to the war zone from which the photographer has flown home. Although few details or specifics of this particular war are given (it is presumably post-1983, the date of the Beirut bombing references in line 6), the photographer has vivid flashbacks to the fields exploding "beneath the feet of running children in a nightmare heat" (lines 11-12) and to the blood-stained "foreign dust" (line 18).
The poem then briefly imagines other settings in loose sketch—the editor's office and the homes of the readers—before ending with an image of the photographer staring at the war zone from an airplane. Those final two lines are the poem's most startling: how did the photographer get to the airplane overlooking the war zone when he was in his dark room in rural England stanzas earlier? There are two possibilities to explain this surprising final setting: the first, most likely, is that the photographer recalls his return flight to England, looking at the war-torn land as he leaves it. The memory is visceral enough that it returns in present-tense, carrying the reader fully into that moment. (The poem then does the work that the photographs cannot, at least according to the photographer.) Alternately, there is the more remote possibility that the final lines signal that the war photographer is returning to the war zone, unable to maintain his new normal in rural England.
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Literary and Historical Context of “War Photographer”
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Literary Context
Carol Ann Duffy, the first female poet laureate of the United Kingdom, has written much of her work through a feminist and/or queer lens. In that regard, "War Photographer" deviates from Duffy's major texts, like the anthologies Standing Female Nude and The World's Wife.
Duffy has often been compared to the poet Phillip Larkin ("An Arundel Tomb"), who died the year that "War Photographer" was published. Larkin, who wrote in early years under a female pseudonym, shares Duffy's simple language and comfort working within formal metrical, rhyme, and structural constraints. However, Duffy has asserted that, "I have little in common with Larkin, who was tall, taciturn and thin-on-top." The poet whom Duffy has most frequently cited as a guiding influence over the development of her craft has been the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.
Duffy's success, like Larkin's, has been described as both critical and commercial. Her poems, "War Photographer" included, are often included in high school curriculum in the UK because of the combined effect of their accessibility and depth.
Historical Context
Although "War Photographer" does not indicate the particular conflict that the title character has documented, the poem was published in the mid-1980s, a time rife with global conflict (the Iran-Iraq War, the Guatemalan and Sri Lankan Civil Wars, etc.), and explicitly references conflicts of the past decade, including in Ireland and Lebanon.
The Vietnam War, however, looms largest, not only in the reference to Phnom Penh, the Cambodian city which was a critical location during the war, but in the strong ties between the imagery in the poem and in "The Terrors of War," a 1972 Vietnam War photograph by Nick Ut. The fields exploding "beneath the feet / of running children in a nightmare heat" (lines 11-12) would seem to be a direct reference to the photograph of children fleeing a napalm bomb explosion, including the naked girl who would come to be known as "Napalm Girl." That photo also depicts a photographer standing at the side of his road, adjusting his camera as the children run by him, and there seems to be a direct line between the moral questions posed in "The Terrors of War" about the role of the photographer in wartime and those tackled within the poem.
Despite the historical vagueness of the poem, it is clear that the poem aims to pay tribute to the victims of all global conflicts which are often overlooked by the general public: line 6 refers explicitly to three of those conflicts. In that way, "War Photographer" is both ahistorical and deeply dedicated to the power of recognizing history and learning from it.
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More “War Photographer” Resources
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External Resources
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"War Photographer" Read Aloud — Listen to the poem read aloud.
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Trailer for the Documentary "War Photographer" — Watch the trailer for the 2011 documentary War Photographer, which explores the responsibilities of photographers in war zones, focusing on photographer James Nachtwey.
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"The Terror of War" — Explore Nick Ut's image from the Vietnam War, "The Terror of War." This famous photograph may have inspired "War Photographer." Note the second photographer at the right of the image examining his camera as children run by him, burnt and naked.
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Carol Ann Duffy Biography — Learn more about Carol Ann Duffy, Britain's first female Poet Laureate, on Poets.org.
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Interview with War Photographer Nick Ut — Watch this NBC interview with Vietnam War photographer Nick Ut about taking his famous photo depicting the naked "Napalm Girl" and the responsibility of photographers in war zones. Ut's comments intersect potently with the themes explored in "War Photographer."
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Carol Ann Duffy
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