War Photographer Notes

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  • War Photographer
    • Language
      • Semantic Field - Religious imagery
        • "Priest preparing to intone a Mass"
        • "Church"
        • "All Flesh is Grass" Reference to Isiah 40:6 - human life is brief
      • Irony
        • "he stares impassively at where he earns his living and they do not care"
          • He has become desensitised through his work and has lost his faith in people.
      • Metaphor
        • "Spools of suffering" - photographic film conveys emotions locked in images
        • "A stranger's features faintly start to twist before his eyes, a half-formed ghost" - photograph developing in a distorted way to convey the haunting nature of the image.
      • Verbs and Adverbials
        • "The reader's eyeballs ***** with tears" - shows the small size of the emotional reaction from the reader of the paper.
        • "From the aeroplane" - adverbial shows literal suspension in the aeroplane which echoes the metaphorical suspense between the ordinary world and the conflict he has been in.
      • enjambment - "blood stained into foreign dust." suggests control
      • juxtaposition
        • "hundred...five or six" - difference between material and emotional cost to the photographer
    • Context
      • "Darkroom", "Red", "Solutions slop in trays" - Photographic development techniques of require these in order to enable to chemicals in interact correctly with the film.
      • "Belfast.  Beirut. Phnom Penh." - all war zones of the 20th century
        • "Phonm Penh" - 'Napalm Girl' Nick Ute Vietnam 1972
          • "of running children in a nightmare heat"
    • Viewpoint - Omniscient 3rd person narrator
      • "In his darkroom"
      • Shows the photographer's inner thoughts and feelings
    • Theme
      • "alone"- can process his images metaphorically as well as literally when he is alone.
      • "He has a job to do" sense of professionalism and duty
    • Rhyme
      • "Rows..glows" Regular rhyming couplets echo the photographers control when in public
      • "with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers" this rhyme trivialises tears.
    • Contrasts
      • "to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel. to fields which don't explode beneath the feet" between the photographer's experiences at work abroad compared with home, makes the mundane complaints of everyday life seem less severe to him.

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