How do I analyse War Photographer for GCSE?

What is War Photographer about?

War Photographer follows a photographer who has come home to England after working in war zones. Alone in his darkroom, the room where photographs are developed, he works on his latest pictures. His hands were steady when he took them, but now they seem to shake. He thinks about how safe England is, where pain is ordinary and the fields do not explode.

As one photograph develops, a man's face appears, and the photographer remembers the cries of the man's wife and how he silently asked permission to take the picture. Out of a hundred pictures, his editor will choose five or six for a Sunday newspaper's magazine. Readers will be moved for a moment and then carry on with their weekend. The poem ends with the photographer on a plane, heading off again and staring down without emotion.

What is the context of War Photographer?

Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955. She was Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2019, the first woman to hold the role. War Photographer was published in her 1985 collection Standing Female Nude. Many of Duffy's poems are dramatic monologues, spoken in the voice of a character, but this one is told in the third person: we watch "he" from the outside.

The places named in the poem were all scenes of conflict in the 1970s and 1980s. Belfast was at the centre of the Troubles, the long and violent conflict in Northern Ireland. Beirut was torn apart by the Lebanese civil war. Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia, which suffered terribly under the Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s.

In those years many British readers saw war photographs in newspapers and in the colour magazines that came with the Sunday papers. For AO3, the key question is what those pictures were for. The photographer risks his life so that the public can see the truth, but Duffy suggests that readers feel sad for a moment and then turn the page.

How does Duffy contrast suffering and indifference in War Photographer?

Duffy opens in the darkroom, lit only by a dim red light. The rolls of film are "spools of suffering set out in ordered rows", and the repeated "s" sounds make the line hushed and careful. The rows are neat, but what they hold is chaos, and "ordered rows" can also suggest the lines of graves in a war cemetery. The photographer is like "a priest preparing to intone a Mass", as if developing the pictures were a sacred ritual that honours the dead.

The last line of the first stanza opens with a list: "Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh." The full stops make each city land like a single heavy beat. The line then ends "All flesh is grass", a quotation from the Bible meaning that human life is short and easily cut down.

The second stanza sets home against war. His hands "did not tremble then / though seem to now": he stayed calm while he worked, but back home the horror catches up with him. In rural England, pain is "ordinary", the kind a spell of good weather can chase away, and the fields are safe for children to run across. That contrast shows how comfortable life at home is, and how far it is from the places in his photographs.

In the third stanza a stranger's face appears on the paper like "a half-formed ghost", which suggests the man did not survive. He also remembers the cries of the man's wife, and how he silently asked for permission to take the picture. He seems uneasy about a job that depends on other people's worst moments.

The last stanza turns to the people who read the paper. A reader's eyes fill with tears "between the bath and pre-lunch beers", and the rhyme of "tears" with "beers" makes their sadness sound brief and shallow. The poem ends on the bitter words "they do not care", most obviously the readers at home, who look at suffering and move on.

What do the form and structure of War Photographer add?

War Photographer has four stanzas of six lines each, and every stanza follows the same rhyme scheme, ABBCDD. Each letter stands for a rhyme sound, so lines two and three rhyme, the last two lines rhyme, and the first and fourth lines stand alone. The neat, regular shape mirrors the photographer's "ordered rows": he tries to put chaos into order, and so does the poem.

Each stanza's closing pair of rhyming lines, called a couplet, lands on something painful, from "grass" in the first stanza to "dust" in the third and "care" in the last. So the tidy pattern keeps delivering the same hard truth.

The poem moves between two places. The present is the quiet darkroom in England, and the memories come from the war zones, so the structure follows the way his mind keeps slipping back. Caesura, a pause in the middle of a line, breaks lines into short sentences such as "He has a job to do", which sound like him steadying himself. At the end he is on a plane again, so the cycle is about to start over.

Which poems does War Photographer compare well with?

War Photographer pairs well with poems about the lasting effects of conflict, and with poems about the gap between war and home. Three strong choices are below. Pick one you can quote confidently from memory.

What could an exam question on War Photographer ask?

In AQA Paper 2, Section B prints one named poem from the Power and Conflict cluster, and you compare it with one other poem from the cluster, chosen from memory. The question is worth 30 marks, assessed on AO1, AO2 and AO3. There are no marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar in this section.

War Photographer could be the printed poem, or the second poem you bring in yourself. Two focuses to practise:

Focus 1: Compare how poets present the way people at home respond to war in War Photographer and in one other poem from Power and Conflict.

Focus 2: Compare how poets present memories of conflict in War Photographer and in one other poem from Power and Conflict.

Here is an original model opening for the first focus, comparing War Photographer with Exposure:

Both poets want people at home to face what war is really like. Owen, who knew the trenches first hand, keeps returning to the flat refrain "But nothing happens", making readers sit through the waiting. Duffy's photographer has pictures to show them, yet his readers weep only "between the bath and pre-lunch beers". Owen hoped to make people feel "the pity of War". Duffy, publishing in 1985, suggests that nearly seventy years later the public still look away.

Key quotations from War Photographer to learn

Six short quotations, each with a line of analysis to learn alongside it.

• "spools of suffering set out in ordered rows": the "s" sounds create a hushed tone, and the ordered rows can suggest graves in a war cemetery.
• "a priest preparing to intone a Mass": the photographer treats his work as a sacred duty to the dead.
• "Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.": real places of conflict, then a line from the Bible reminding us that every life is fragile.
• "did not tremble then / though seem to now": calm on the job, shaken at home. The horror catches up with him once he is safe.
• "a half-formed ghost": the developing photograph brings a dead man back, and he haunts the photographer too.
• "they do not care": the poem's final words, a bitter judgement on readers at home who look at suffering and move on.