With the Photographer
by Stephen Leacock
About the author
Stephen Leacock was a Canadian writer and McGill University economics professor who became one of the English-speaking world's most widely read humorists in the early 20th century. His pieces rarely aim at grand targets — instead he turns his narrator's own small, everyday frustrations (a haircut, a bank visit, a photograph) into gentle, self-mocking comedy.
What happens in the story
The narrator goes to a photographer's studio wanting an ordinary, honest portrait. What follows is a one-sided battle: the photographer treats the narrator's natural face as a problem to be corrected rather than a likeness to be captured. He repositions the narrator's head, criticises his expression, and issues a stream of contradictory instructions — look natural, but not like that; smile, but not too much.
Worn down and irritated by the process, the narrator finally reacts with a flash of genuine annoyance — and it's this unguarded, unposed moment that the photographer secretly captures, ironically producing the one authentic expression of the whole session. When the narrator is shown the finished proof, it has been so heavily retouched — smoothed, brightened, reshaped — that it barely looks like him at all. He turns it down, preferring to look like himself.
Theme: the story's real target
The story is a gentle satire on vanity — the modern instinct to prefer a flattering, artificial image of ourselves over an honest one. Leacock isn't attacking the narrator or the photographer so much as a whole culture that has decided a "good photo" means a corrected, idealised photo. The irony that the only genuinely truthful moment in the story is captured by accident, during a fit of temper, is the story's sharpest joke.
Exam-style questions and model answers
Q. Why does the narrator visit the photographer, and how does his experience differ from his expectations?
He goes expecting a simple, natural portrait. Instead he is subjected to an elaborate, fussy process where the photographer treats his ordinary face as something to be fixed, leaving the narrator frustrated rather than pleased.
Q. Bring out the irony in how the "best" photograph is taken.
The photographer spends the whole session trying to engineer a composed, pleasant pose — yet the shot he is happiest with is the one taken by surprise, during the narrator's flash of real irritation. The most "successful" photograph is the one moment he wasn't trying to perform at all.
Q. What does the story suggest about our attitude to photographs?
That we've come to value flattering artifice over honest likeness — and that chasing a "perfect" image can mean losing the thing a photograph is supposed to capture in the first place: what someone actually looks like.