The Necessity and Yet the Price of Photo Journalism – A Poem by Tracy K. Smith from her 2007 Collection Duende


Tracy K. Smith (1976 -) Former US Poet Laureate (2017-2019) and former host of the Slowdown

Letter to a Photojournalist Going In

You go to the pain. City after city. Borders
Where they peer into your eyes as if to erase you.

You go by bus or truck, days at a time, just taking it
When they throw you in a room or kick you at your gut.

Taking it when a strong fist hammers person after person
A little deeper into the ground. Your camera blinks:

Soldiers smoking between rounds. Bodies
Blown open like curtains. In the neighbourhoods,

Boys brandish plastic guns with TV bravado. Men
Ask you to look them in the face and say what’s right.

At night you sleep, playing it all back in reverse:

The dance of the wind in a valley of dirt. Rags and tools,
All the junk that rises up, resurrected, then disappears

Into newly formed windows and walls. People
Close their mouths and run backwards out of frame.

Up late, your voice fits my ear like a secret.
But who can hear two things at once?

Errant stars flare, shatter. A whistle, the indescribable thud
Of an era spilling its matter into the night. Who can say the word love

Where everything — everything — pushes back with the promise
To grind itself to dust?


                                     And what if there’s no dignity to what we do,
None at all? If our work — what you see, what I say —  is nothing

But a way to kid ourselves we might last? If trust is just
Another human trick that’ll lick its lips and laugh as baclks away?

Sometimes I think you’re right, wanting to lose everything and wander
Like a blind king. Wanting to squeeze a lifetime between your hands

And press it into a single flimsy frame. Will you take it to your lips
Like the body of a woman, something to love in passing,

Or set it down, free finally of the camera,
Which we all know is just a hollow box, mechanized to obey?

Sometimes I want my heart to beat like yours: from the outside in,
A locker stuffed with faces that refuse to be named. For time

To land at my feet like a grenade.

Tracy K. Smith from Duende, Graywolf Press, 2007

Refugees in Ukraine. Photo Credit: Evgenii Maloletka, Photo Journalist from Ukraine. Twitter Credit: Ilya Kaminsky March 12, 2022

When I came across Tracy K. Smith’s poem, above, a few days ago I went straight in mind and heart to Ukraine. And the vital business of telling the photographic stories of war, its brutality and destruction.  But when I think of a photo journalist I think of the result, not the eye that saw it, the finger that clicked it. We can see the toll of a war but not the toll on the witness whose job it is, is to be witness and be hugely at risk.

Tracy’s poem makes the work of a photo journalist personal. Goes past the camera and the pics to the consequences for the person taking them and the consequences for someone loving them. And the searing question by the letter writer that uses intimate sexual imagery as she imagines, wonders if the photographer could ever stop the dangerous line of work or is he too much in love with it.

Sometimes I think you’re right, wanting to lose everything and wander
Like a blind king. Wanting to squeeze a lifetime between your hands

And press it into a single flimsy frame. Will you take it to your lips
Like the body of a woman, something to love in passing,

Or set it down, free finally of the camera,
Which we all know is just a hollow box, mechanized to obey?

So much in those six lines. The chill I get when I read a hollow box, mechanized to obey. And I think of other hollow things like gun barrels also, mechanized to obey. And, the idea now of a camera as weapon. These layers of meaning.

The form of the poem adds another interesting element. It has two halves. Seventeen shorter lines and seventeen longer lines. The first half gives the literal specifics of being a war photographer. The details, especially the replay that takes bomb destruction and put it all back into place. And then the inimate moment in two lines at the end of that half that ends with a phone call and the mysterious question: Who can hear two things at once?

The last two lines of the first half are a move, I think, into the next half which is dealing more with existential issues and bigger ideas around love and the validity, the dignity or lack of dignity, of the work the photojournalist is doing. The personal motives. Is it more selfish than selfless and the speaker even brings herself into the discussion: If our work — what you see, what I say — is nothing But a way to kid ourselves we might last? If the speaker is a poet as is Tracy, what a big question.

And how it is that love enters the poem and complicaters it. As love would do if one’s beloved is risking their life in a war zone they choose to enter. This last half is a lot more more emotionally sticky. The intimacy of a letter. And this question, what  a question, one made so real and contemporary with the destruction of Ukraine in full progress:

Who can say the word love

Where everything — everything — pushes back with the promise
To grind itself to dust? 

Of course, this is a personal question, the speaker dealing with her love for a photojournalist who chooses to be in a place they could be killed any minutes. But it is also a universal question. The place of love in a time of oblieration. Tracy asks: Who can say the word love and my answer is we all must say it especially because we will all end up as dust, war or no war.

As the poem ends I am so aware of the two threads, the two stories inside the poem. One about the reality of being a photojournalist in a war. The second about what it means when the photojournalist is in a relationship. The last two lines get very personal. How the speaker realizes her partner pays a price to survive doing what he does but can she pay the same price? Can she make her heart beat from the outside in. Cut herself off in some way from what is happening around her? And the last sentence that goes off like a bomb, a grenade: For time// to land at my feet like a grenade? Time that could put an end to her partner and their relationship in a flash.

For me, the success of this poem lies in how much it grapples with the personal inside the impersonal of war. The many ways wars can make victims of so many and not just those directly inside the horror and chaos. And I think of all the people in Ukraine, the way the evrything of Putin’s invasion: pushes back with the promise/ To grind itself to dust.

 

 

 

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