War Photographer Flashcards
“Spools of suffering.”
Alliteration emphasises the pain shown in the photos.
“Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.”
The caesuras show that time is passing but to him they’re all together.
“All flesh is grass” is a biblical reference to life moving on.
“In his darkroom he is finally alone.”
He is physically isolated from others and
metaphorically in a dark place after taking photos of devastation.
“Solutions slop in trays beneath his hands, which did not tremble then though seem to now.”
Sibilance makes the reader imagine the sound of fluid.
He’s moved by the war but is desensitised.
“Rural England.”
Juxtaposes the narrators home to the war zone.
Contrasts to the widespread of war.
“A stranger’s features faintly start to twist before his eyes, a half-formed ghost.”
The photo is forming in the liquid and the
photographer remembers their face contorting with
pain.
“Blood stained into foreign dust.”
Metaphor - People are constantly dying all over the world but they’re not remembered and he has to take photos of them just before they die.
“A hundred agonies.”
He takes a hundred photos to highlight the pain these people got through.
They’re contained in photographs to be seen instead of peacefully buried.
“HIs editor will pick out five or six for Sunday’s supplement.”
Shows how insensitive Western society is for exploiting people’s pain for entertainment.
“The reader’s eyeballs prick with tears between the bath and the pre-lunch beers.”
“They do not care.”
He hates how society acts as they don’t see how widespread it is and consider unimportant.
Isolated from society as he constantly sees the
suffering.
Form
A narrative.
Profile from a spectator of war.
Structure
4 equal stanzas.
Dark and funeral-like tone.
Rhyming couplet after an unrhymed line - ABBCDD. Could represent the narrator trying to bring order to his chaotic life.
