War Photographer: a hundred agonies, and five or six get printed

Does a camera simply record what is in front of it? That is what most of us assume when we look at a news photograph. In eighteen fifty-five, during a war, the photographer Roger Fenton took two pictures of the same road from the same spot. In one, cannonballs lie in the ditch. In the other, they cover the road, and that is the one that became famous. Many historians think the cannonballs were moved for the shot, though nobody can prove it. Either way, someone chose what the public would see, and Carol Ann Duffy's War Photographer is about exactly that choosing. Who chooses, and who looks away, is where her poem ends up.

War Photographer is still in copyright, so this video quotes short pieces of it; have the anthology open if you can. It opens in a darkroom, the room where film is developed into photographs. "In his darkroom he is finally alone". Finally tells you about the crowds and the noise he has just escaped, and the silence he now has to sit in with what he saw. Around him are "spools of suffering set out in ordered rows". The rolls of film hold other people's pain, and they are filed neatly, the opposite of the places they came from. The only light is red, and Duffy says it is "as though this were a church and he a priest preparing to intone a Mass". To intone is to chant, as a priest does in a service. Why describe the darkroom as a church: his faith, a sacred duty, or the quiet? A sacred duty. Developing the pictures becomes a ritual for the dead, which gives the job a seriousness, and a guilt, all at once.

Then the poem swings between two places. He has been to Belfast, Beirut and Phnom Penh, and now he is home in rural England. At home, pain is ordinary, the kind good weather can fix. In the places he photographed, fields explode under running children. Putting two things side by side so each shows up the other is called juxtaposition. In the developing tray, a stranger's face slowly appears, like a ghost, and he remembers the cries of the man's wife. Then the numbers: "A hundred agonies in black-and-white", from which his editor will pick out five or six for the Sunday supplement, the magazine that comes with a weekend paper. The readers' eyes prick with tears for a moment, somewhere between the bath and a drink before lunch. And the poem ends with him on a plane, looking down at the country where "he earns his living and they do not care". Who are they, in the last line? The people at home who buy the paper, and the editor choosing five or six. They glance, feel something, and turn the page.

And the photographer is not above it. He earns his living from the same pictures, so the last line turns on the reader without letting him off: the poem accuses the whole chain, including us.

The form joins in. Four neat stanzas of six lines each, with a regular rhyme pattern, as ordered as the rows of film, and as tidy as the reader's Sunday. The disorder is all in the pictures.

Here is what to carry out of War Photographer: five lines, from the darkroom to the plane. "In his darkroom he is finally alone": finally tells you about the crowd he has escaped and the silence he now sits in. "spools of suffering set out in ordered rows": suffering is filed, in a room as orderly as the war zones were not. The darkroom "as though this were a church", he "a priest": the religious framing gives the job a duty and a guilt together. "A hundred agonies in black-and-white": a hundred people become a quantity of prints, and then five or six become a feature. And the last line, "he earns his living and they do not care": the reader is accused, and the photographer is part of the same trade. In the cluster, War Photographer answers what conflict leaves behind, and its view of the fighting through a lens reaches the reality of conflict too.

A run through the lines to finish, a word gone from three of them. Spools of suffering set out in ordered what? Rows. Ordered rows, suffering filed away neatly. Now the numbers: a hundred agonies in black-and-what? White. A hundred agonies, reduced to prints. Try the last line: he earns his living and they do not what? Care. They do not care, and he is paid either way. One more: a war photo beside a holiday advert. Which moment does that page play out? The readers' tears between the bath and the drinks. The juxtaposition puts the suffering and the comfortable weekend on the same page, and the comfort wins. A camera records what is in front of it. Someone still chooses what you see, and Duffy's last line asks what you do once you have seen it.

Explain who they are in the final line and you've got this down: give it a thumbs-up. Still blurry? Save it, then explain that last line to a friend, out loud, once.

Next in the chapter: Tissue: everything that runs your life is printed on something you could tear. Hopefully that's next in your feed, but if not, search for ScholaFly E L four oh, fifteen.

Every other video is on scholafly.com too, easy to search by video code or by keyword. Whatever you're revising, go there and have a look, or, watch the next video.