War Photographer — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
War Photographer
The poems
What you need to know
A war photographer reflects on how a photograph's frame shapes what viewers believe, setting a cheerful picture of girls at Ascot against a picture of a young girl carrying a baby through a bombed street, and the comforting caption the paper gave it.
How Satyamurti's contrasts, dashes, the language of framing and the final simile of a blood stain question whether photographs can tell the truth about suffering.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'The reassurance of the frame is flexible', 'I seek out the tragic, the absurd', 'a pair of peach, sun-gilded girls', 'staggering down some devastated street', 'She saw me seeing her', 'mouth too small for her dark scream', 'Even in hell the human spirit', 'hell, like heaven, is untidy', 'arbitrary as a blood stain on a wall'.
Form: five stanzas of free verse of uneven length in the photographer's voice, with dashes that introduce each example, enjambment, and an ending that turns from the newspaper's caption to the speaker's own judgement.
Context: Carole Satyamurti (1939–2019), a poet and sociologist who taught at the Tavistock Clinic, where she studied the stories people tell about themselves; the poem's date of 1987; and the way newspapers choose, frame and caption pictures of war for readers far from the fighting.
Compares well with: What Were They Like? (civilians who suffer in war), Belfast Confetti (civilians caught up in violence), Poppies (those at home who see war from a distance) and The Charge of the Light Brigade (how war is reported to people at home).
