Answer:
Stanza 1:
The speaker uses intense imagery to reveal what a picture of war can do to the viewer. Upon first glance, the picture is safely inside the frame. To most viewers, the photo is of a different place and perhaps even a different time. Thus, one is not forced to entirely enter into the photo. The speaker reveals that as a person looks at a war photograph, they can think outside the frame of the photo and believe that “people eat, sleep, love normally”. But life is different for the photographer herself. She must “seek out the tragic” and thus live in it. For the one who sees the realities of war first hand, life outside of war is hard to imagine. One might even forget that it exists.
Stanza 2:
The speaker recalls a picture she took in Ascot. The picture was clearly of some rich, fairly privileged girls. She describes them as wearing silk and giggling in the grass as they sipped champagne. This is a group of girls who represent happiness and perhaps ignorance of the tragedies going on in the world around them.
Stanza 3:
The speaker drives her point home by providing a specific instance and revealing that it happened recently. She remembers following “a small girl” as she was “staggering down some devastated street”. The vivid description of the small child allows the reader to enter into the scene and feel as though he is there with the photographer, following the small girl.
Stanza 4:
The speaker continues to describe the small child who held the baby. The fact that the explosive device is described as “the first bomb of the morning” suggests that there have been numerous bombs before this one and that many more would follow.
Stanza 5:
The photographer reveals the way pictures can be deceiving. While she saw the child firsthand, looked into her eyes, heard her scream, and watched her run, dropping the baby in her arms, the picture she captured did not tell the whole story. In the picture, it looked almost as if the child was smiling.
This gives readers the false idea that the child was happy. This allows the readers to believe that even though the war was going on and people were starving and dying, the people could still be happy. This, the photographer knows, is untrue. However, it is apparently what the public wanted to hear, and therefore what the photographer published.
Explanation:
More information: https://poemanalysis.com/carole-satyamurti/war-photographer/
Hope this helps.
