Photographs (Symbol)
In this poem, the speaker's photographs symbolize his traumatic memories of the war. They literally remind him of this time in his life and also symbolically represent his experiences. Duffy uses language to reflect the remembrance of traumatic experiences by saying that the photograph develops "before his eyes, / a half-formed ghost." This visually dramatizes the experience of flashbacks.
Newspaper (Symbol)
The photographs are selected by a newspaper "editor" and printed in "Sunday's supplement." While the poem describes the newspaper as a literal publication in the fourth stanza, the newspaper symbolically represents the disconnect between peacetime and wartime countries, and the failure of humanity to feel empathy for other nations. The newspaper brings the message of war to this audience, but fails to fully permeate and inspire empathy. This is represented by the readers' eyes "prick[ing] with tears" when they read, yet they quickly move on to other activities, "the bath and pre-lunch beers." Due to both physical and emotional distance from the conflicts occurring in other countries, the citizens and leaders of peacetime countries fail to act to prevent suffering.
Darkroom (Symbol)
Literally, a darkroom is a special room used by photographers to process film, using a variety of specific equipment including chemical solutions. However, in "War Photographer," Duffy styles it a "dark room," breaking the word into two in order to emphasize the symbolic, emotional "darkness" of the photographer's work. The positioning of this phrase in the poem's first line introduces both the setting and, on a more symbolic level, alludes to the poem's subject matter (war and suffering). The symbol alerts the reader to other photographic symbols throughout the poem, such as the red light used to illuminate the darkroom, which also alludes to the stained-glass of a church (in stanza one) as well as the blood-stained dust (in stanza three).
Ghost (Symbol)
Line 15 describes the developing photograph as a "half-formed ghost." While this refers to the blurriness of the photograph, it also contains at least two symbols. First, it symbolizes the death of the stranger whose "blood stained into foreign dust" in the conflict scene depicted. It also implies that the stranger died too young; just as the photograph appears "half-formed," the man's life was only half-formed before his premature death due to war. Second, the photograph symbolizes the photographer's trauma and how the subjects he depicts and horrific scenes he witnesses continue to haunt him like ghosts. This is a common symptom of PTSD: being haunted by the past and experiencing flashbacks that are as vivid and real as photographs. The symbol of the ghost also adds evidence to the theory that Duffy's poem is based on the experiences of her friend the war photographer Don McCullin, because McCullin's memoir is entitled Sleeping with Ghosts: A Life's Work in Photography. Like Duffy, McCullin describes photographs as "ghosts" because they preserve the past and have a haunting quality.
Suffering (Motif)
One of the main motifs of this poem is the experience of warfare, and its traumatic emotional impact. For example, the photographer remembers a moment when a man died in front of his wife, a memory that still haunts him in the present. He describes the photographs as being a "hundred agonies in black and white." Duffy also uses imagery to describe the horrors and suffering of this setting, emphasizing the "nightmare heat" and remembering how "the blood stained into foreign dust."
