War Photographer

"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. 

War Photographer

In his darkroom he is finally alone

with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.

The only light is red and softly glows,

as though this were a church and he

a priest preparing to intone a Mass.

Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.

He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays

beneath his hands, which did not tremble then

though seem to now. Rural England. Home again

to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel, 10

to fields which don't explode beneath the feet

of running children in a nightmare heat.

Something is happening. A stranger's features

faintly start to twist before his eyes,

a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries 15

of this man's wife, how he sought approval

without words to do what someone must

and how the blood stained into foreign dust.

A hundred agonies in black-and-white 

from which his editor will pick out five or six 20

for Sunday's supplement. The reader's eyeballs prick

with tears between the bath and pre

-lunch beers.

From the aeroplane he stares impassively at where

he earns his living and they do not care.

CAROL ANN DUFFY