I have been a teacher for 28 years, a Headteacher for 13 years and, at the age of 52, this much I know about teaching Carol Ann Duffy's poem "War Photographer".
It doesn’t take much to make me feel like a dinosaur these days. I contemplated purchasing a new SLR camera a couple of years ago. However, the shop assistant made me feel so hopeless in the shadow of his overwhelming expertise that I decided instead to tidy up my twenty-eight year old manual Minolta, buy a couple of reels of black & white film and stick to what I know. The trouble is, what I know isn’t what my students know. When I began teaching at Eastbourne Sixth Form College in 1988, the Art department had a small dark room. I became addicted to printing my own photographs. As soon as teaching had finished for the day I would lock myself in the dark room and get lost in the DEVELOP:STOP:FIX:WASH:DRY process of producing black and white prints. I may not have put in my 10,000 hours, but I won’t have been far off! Recently, a number of my English department colleagues were kind enough to invite me to teach a guest lesson on Carol Ann Duffy’s “War Photographer”; however, unless you are familiar with how photographs came into existence pre-digital, you cannot fully comprehend this poem... WAR PHOTOGRAPHER In his dark room 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, 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 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 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. What is the main moral conflict of the poem? So, if you are teaching this poem, here are four videos to help, which can be used in the Powerpoint presentation below as indicated on the blank slides. One video illustrates how to print photographs; the Dunhill video introduces Don McCullin, the war photographer Duffy’s poem is based upon, and his moral conflict as he takes shots of people dying; an extract from the documentary, McCullin, gives a brilliant account of him working during the Battle of Hue in Vietnam; and the last one, from CNN, sees McCullin question the worth of everything he has done as a war photographer. [wpvideo 0QsPPcuC] [wpvideo 55D2uTZk] [wpvideo LiDbGYQE] [wpvideo RAjYvEj2] Going beyond the obvious. One of the key conflicts in the poem is explored in the final stanza: the decision for the Sunday supplement’s editor as to which photographs s/he selects for his/her readers. When I began teaching A level Media Studies I recorded a programme on this very decision, a VHS recording which is long lost. The picture editors of the Sunday Times and the Observer were discussing why they had chosen two different photographs to accompany their respective articles on the American Air Force’s carpet bombing of the retreating Iraqi army on the Basra Road at the end of the first Iraq war in 1991. The Sunday Times had used a long distance shot, the picture editor arguing that he did not want his readers and their families to be upset at the breakfast table by graphic shots of the human cost of the US attack. His readers, he argued, could imagine what it must have been like: The Observer had taken a different approach, printing Kenneth Jarecke’s famous picture of the “charred Iraqi” soldier. The Observer magazine’s picture editor was utterly certain that he wanted his readers to understand as clearly as possible the pure horror of war: Neither of these two shots was taken by McCullin; however, I have included them in the middle of this Powerpoint to stimulate debate amongst students. [scribd id=338961474 key=key-MHKbkTVIUlScLAgyGpKh mode=scroll] Lately, I've been working on the clarity of my explanations. In the final video below, you can watch how I present the two images to students. Note how I build the images up, clarify the decisions made by each picture editor and warn the students of the graphic nature of the Observer image to engage their critical faculties. [wpvideo 0tgOxzUU]
