A man walks into a studio to have his photograph taken. That is the whole plot. Nothing explodes, nobody dies, and the entire thing is over in a few pages. And yet With the Photographer is one of the sharpest stories in your Treasure Chest, because Stephen Leacock uses a completely ordinary errand to ask a question that stings: what happens to a person when somebody decides he needs improving?
Most students read this story once, laugh at the photographer, and move on. That is exactly why they lose marks. The examiner does not want you to report the jokes. The examiner wants you to show that you understand why the humour turns bitter at the end, and what Leacock is actually attacking. This chapter works through the story scene by scene, then gives you the character notes, the thematic evidence and the technical vocabulary that examiners reward — with model answers to show you how to structure them.
Work through these in order the first time. After that, use this menu to jump straight to whatever you are revising.
- Where This Story Sits in Your Syllabus
- What Actually Happens, Scene by Scene
- The Narrator: A Man Who Only Wanted His Own Face
- The Photographer: An Artist Who Cannot See People
- How Leacock Builds the Comedy
- Themes You Can Build an Answer On
- Narration, Irony and the Anticlimax
- Model Answers: Short, Mid-Length and Extended
- The Paper and How to Answer It
- Practice Worksheet
Where This Story Sits in Your Syllabus
For ICSE Class 10, English is examined in two papers. Paper 1 is English Language. Paper 2 is Literature in English, two hours, 80 marks, with a further 20 marks of Internal Assessment awarded by your school. The Class 10 portion of Paper 2 has three parts: the drama (Julius Caesar, Acts III, IV and V), the five prescribed short stories, and the five prescribed poems.
With the Photographer by Stephen Leacock is the first of those five short stories. The Council is clear that all five stories are to be studied — you cannot leave one out and hope. In the paper, prose questions usually begin with an extract from the story, followed by questions that move from simple comprehension to a longer response in your own words.
The Council’s own instruction for Drama and Prose is that questions will be central to the text, and that you must show you have understood the passage and can respond in your own words. That single line tells you how to prepare: know the story well enough to explain it without borrowing anyone else’s sentences.
What Actually Happens, Scene by Scene
The story is told by the man having his photograph taken, so we only ever see what he sees. Keep the sequence straight in your head — extract questions almost always depend on knowing where in the story a passage falls.
1. The waiting. The narrator arrives at the studio and is told the photographer will be free in a moment. That moment turns into an hour. He sits in the waiting room with a pile of magazines so old that they belong to another era altogether. Leacock is already teaching us the tone: this is a place where a customer’s time simply does not count.
2. The inspection. The photographer finally appears — a drooping, dispirited man who looks at the narrator the way a workman looks at a piece of material. He studies the face and delivers his verdict: the face is quite wrong
. Not unusual, not difficult. Wrong. The narrator, who has lived with this face all his life, is thrown completely.
3. The manipulation. What follows is a comic ordeal. The photographer orders the head turned, the eyes rolled, the ears drooped, the mouth closed, the lungs expanded, the neck humped. Every feature is corrected as though the man were a lump of clay. The narrator meekly obeys, offering feeble little protests that nobody listens to.
4. The verdict, and the shot taken in anger. Still not satisfied, the photographer criticises the face outright — he does not like the head, does not like the ears, does not like the face at all. Stung, the narrator finally loses patience and rises from his seat in anger, protesting that this is his face and he has lived with it for forty years. It is exactly at this moment — as he is caught mid-protest, animated and annoyed — that the photographer pulls the string and takes the picture, pleased to have caught the features “in a moment of animation.” The narrator is told to come back on Saturday for the proof, unaware of what has actually been captured.
5. The proof. He returns. The photographer presents the result with enormous pride. The face in the photograph is not his face: the eyebrows have been erased and redrawn by a process the photographer proudly names, the mouth has been adjusted because the original was “too low,” and the hair has been redrawn away from the brow. What is left is a smooth, sanctimonious stranger.
6. The outburst. The narrator finally breaks. He points out, feature by feature, that these things belong to him. They may be poor features, but they are his, he has had them all his life, and he came for a photograph of himself, not of somebody the photographer would have preferred. He tells the photographer to keep the picture and hang it up for his own pleasure — and he leaves in tears.
Do not write that the narrator “fights with the photographer” or “refuses to be photographed”. He does neither. He submits meekly to the physical positioning throughout, and it is only when the photographer criticises his face outright that he loses patience and protests — the very protest that gets him photographed mid-outburst. He protests again, more fully, when he sees the retouched proof. His meekness during the actual sitting is the point — an answer that turns him into a hero throughout destroys Leacock’s satire.
The Narrator: A Man Who Only Wanted His Own Face
The narrator is never named, and that is deliberate. He is Everyman — any ordinary person walking into any place where an expert is waiting to tell them what is wrong with them.
He is self-conscious. Notice how quickly he accepts the photographer’s judgement. One sentence about his face being wrong and he begins to doubt a face he has owned for decades. Leacock is showing how little it takes to shake an ordinary person’s confidence.
He is absurdly polite. Through the whole physical ordeal he cooperates. His objections are tiny, almost apologetic, and he never once walks out. This meekness is comic, but it is also uncomfortably recognisable.
He is more sensitive than he looks. The ending is not a joke. When he finally speaks, he is not defending his beauty — he freely admits his features are unimpressive. He is defending his right to exist as himself. The tears at the close are genuine, and they change the whole flavour of the story in its last few lines.
Character questions par ek chhota formula yaad rakhiye: trait + evidence from the story + what it shows about Leacock’s point. Sirf “he was shy and polite” likhne se do marks nahin milte. Trait ke saath ek specific moment jodiye, phir ek line mein bataiye ki wo moment story ke theme se kaise juda hai.
The Photographer: An Artist Who Cannot See People
The photographer is a brilliant comic creation because Leacock never makes him cruel. He is worse than cruel — he is indifferent. He is not trying to insult the narrator. It simply does not occur to him that the man in front of him is a person at all.
He speaks the language of the workshop. Faces are wrong or right, wide or narrow, usable or not. He assesses a human head exactly as a carpenter assesses a plank.
He believes he is an artist. This is the heart of the satire. Everything he does — the manipulation, the retouching, the erasing of ears — he does in the sincere belief that he is improving reality. He is proud of the proof. He expects gratitude.
He never once listens. The narrator’s small protests bounce straight off him. Even at the end, faced with a weeping customer, he shows no understanding of what he has done wrong.
Leacock is not attacking photography. He is attacking a whole class of professionals who become so absorbed in their own expertise that the human being in front of them disappears. Read the story that way and it stops being a period piece about a studio and becomes something you have probably experienced yourself.
How Leacock Builds the Comedy
You will be asked about the humour, so learn the machinery rather than just enjoying it.
Exaggeration (hyperbole). The wait is not long, it is absurd. The magazines are not old, they are archaeological. The list of adjustments to the narrator’s body goes on past the point of sense. Leacock pushes a familiar irritation until it becomes ridiculous.
Understatement. Alongside the exaggeration sits its opposite. The narrator reports outrageous treatment in a flat, mild, apologetic tone. The gap between what is happening and how calmly he describes it is where much of the laughter comes from.
Repetition. Command after command, correction after correction, each one delivered in the same bored professional voice. The relentless rhythm of these commands becomes a source of comedy in itself.
The reversal at the end. Leacock lets you laugh for the whole story and then quietly removes the joke. The final speech and the tears are not comic at all. This turn is the single most important thing to notice about the story, and it is what separates a competent answer from a distinguished one.
Leacock’s humour is satirical, not slapstick. Satire uses laughter to attack something. Here the target is professional arrogance and the modern habit of “correcting” people into a more acceptable version of themselves. If your answer names the target, you are writing at the top band.
Themes You Can Build an Answer On
Identity and individuality. The central theme. A person’s face is not a design problem to be solved; it is who they are. When the photographer erases the narrator’s ears he is not tidying a picture, he is deleting a man. The narrator’s closing speech — ugly features, but mine — is the story’s thesis stated out loud.
Appearance versus reality. The photograph is technically flawless and completely false. Leacock sets perfection against truth and makes it clear which one matters.
The arrogance of expertise. The photographer’s authority comes entirely from being the one holding the camera. Within his studio his opinion about another man’s face is treated as fact — including by the man himself.
The passive individual. A quieter theme, and a very useful one. Nothing in this story could have happened if the narrator had simply said no. Leacock is laughing at the photographer, but he is also gently laughing at us for putting up with him.
Human dignity. The tears at the end lift the story out of comedy. What has been taken from the narrator is not a good photograph. It is his dignity, and he has paid for the privilege.
Theme question mein do se zyada themes mat likhiye. Ek strong theme, teen alag moments se prove kiya gaya, hamesha paanch themes ki list se better score karta hai. Examiner depth dekhta hai, list nahin.
Narration, Irony and the Anticlimax
First-person narration. We are locked inside the victim’s head. We hear his small protests and his private embarrassment, but we never learn what the photographer is thinking. That restriction is what makes the photographer feel so inhuman, and it is what makes the final outburst land.
Verbal and situational irony. A photographer’s job is to record what is there. This one destroys what is there and calls it art. A customer pays for a likeness of himself and receives a likeness of a stranger. The irony is built into the situation, not just the dialogue.
Anticlimax. Leacock repeatedly builds up and then deflates. The long, solemn preparation leads to a photograph nobody wanted. The grand professional ceremony produces a fraud.
Tonal shift. The last paragraph changes gear without warning — from farce to genuine hurt. Learn to describe this shift in your own words; it is the most quotable technical observation you can make about this story, and very few candidates make it.
Model Answers: Short, Mid-Length and Extended
Read these for structure, not to memorise. Notice how each one answers the actual question asked and stops when it has done so.
Question: Why did the narrator have to wait so long at the studio, and what does the waiting room tell us?
Model answer: The photographer kept him waiting for about an hour without explanation. The waiting room, stocked with magazines decades out of date, suggests a place where customers are routinely neglected and their time treated as worthless — a first hint of the indifference that will define the photographer.
Why it scores: A short sub-question wants two things. The answer gives the fact, then one inference, and stops.
Question: How does the photographer treat the narrator during the sitting? What does this reveal about him?
Model answer: The photographer treats the narrator as material rather than as a person. He inspects the face and pronounces it wrong, then issues a stream of physical commands — turn the head, roll the eyes, droop the ears, close the mouth, hump the neck — adjusting the man limb by limb as a sculptor might adjust clay. He never asks what the customer wants and never registers his small protests. This reveals a professional so absorbed in his craft that the human being in front of him has ceased to exist for him. His rudeness is not malice; it is a complete failure of imagination, and that is precisely what Leacock is satirising.
Why it scores: Roughly one developed point per mark. Notice the last sentence — it links the character back to the author’s purpose, which is what lifts an answer out of the middle band.
Question: “With the Photographer is a funny story with a serious heart.” Discuss.
Plan first (one minute, in the margin): comedy machinery → the turn at the end → what the story is really about → close.
Model answer: For most of its length the story is pure comedy. Leacock takes an errand every reader recognises — sitting for a photograph — and inflates every irritation until it becomes absurd: an hour of waiting, magazines from another century, and a photographer who greets a customer by announcing that his face is wrong. The comedy is sharpened by the narrator’s flat, apologetic voice; he reports his own humiliation so mildly that the reader laughs at the gap between what is being done to him and how calmly he describes it.
Yet the laughter has a target. Leacock is satirising the professional who has become so absorbed in his expertise that people no longer register as people. The photographer rearranges a stranger’s head like a workman shaping a plank, and when he finally produces the proof he has erased the eyebrows and redrawn them, adjusted the mouth, and redrawn the hair away from the brow, replacing the man’s expression with something smoother and emptier. He does all of this convinced that he is improving reality, and he expects to be thanked for it.
The serious heart appears in the closing lines. The narrator, who has meekly obeyed every instruction, finally objects — and his objection is not that the photograph is unflattering. He concedes that his features are poor. He insists only that they belong to him: he has had them all his life and he paid for a picture of himself, not of a stranger the photographer preferred. When he leaves in tears, the comedy stops dead. What has been taken from him is not a good likeness but his dignity, and Leacock deliberately refuses to let us keep laughing.
The story is therefore funny in its method and serious in its purpose. Its lasting force comes from that final turn, where a small comic humiliation is revealed as an assault on a man’s right to be himself.
Why it scores: Four tight paragraphs, each with one job, and a conclusion that answers the exact wording of the question. No retelling of the plot for its own sake. Note the length: this is the fullest answer the paper will ask of you, not a school essay.
Extended answers mein sabse badi galti hai poori kahani dobara likh dena. Examiner ko story pata hai. Usko aapki argument chahiye, summary nahin. Har paragraph ka ek kaam hona chahiye, aur har paragraph question ke shabdon se juda hona chahiye.
The Paper and How to Answer It
English Paper 2, Literature in English, is a two-hour paper of 80 marks, with 20 further marks of Internal Assessment awarded by your school. The Class 10 portion covers Julius Caesar Acts III to V, the five Treasure Chest short stories and the five Treasure Chest poems. All five stories are prescribed, so all five must be prepared.
For prose, the Council states that questions will be central to the text, that extracts may be given leading to questions, and that you must show you have understood the passage and can respond clearly in your own words. Four practical consequences follow.
One: know the sequence. Extract questions frequently ask what happened just before or just after the passage. If your sense of the order is vague, you lose easy marks.
Two: answer in your own words. Copying chunks of the extract back into your answer is the fastest way to lose credit. Explain, do not transcribe.
Know the shape of the prose questions. CISCE’s own competency-focused question set for Literature in English Class X shows two kinds of item. There are multiple-choice questions worth one mark each, and there are extract-based questions — a passage from the text followed by several sub-questions — carrying sixteen marks in total. The sub-questions are not equal: the early ones test straightforward understanding in a sentence or two, while the later ones ask for analysis and need a developed paragraph.
Match the length of your answer to the weight of the sub-question. Roughly one developed point per mark is a safe guide. A short comprehension sub-question needs two or three sentences, not a paragraph; the extended analytical sub-question at the end needs a planned response of about a hundred and twenty to a hundred and fifty words. Writing an essay where a sentence was wanted costs you time you will need later in the paper.
Time management: 80 marks, 120 minutes. Roughly ek mark per minute rakhiye aur 20 minute reading, planning aur checking ke liye bacha ke chaliye. Long answer shuru karne se pehle do minute ka plan margin mein zaroor likhiye — wo do minute aapko poore paper mein sabse zyada marks dete hain.
Practice Worksheet
Ten questions, arranged from short comprehension to full-length response. Attempt each one on paper before opening the answer.
Pehle khud kijiye, phir answer kholiye.
Q1. How long is the narrator kept waiting, and what does he do while waiting?
Show Answer
He is kept waiting for about an hour. He passes the time in the waiting room with a pile of magazines so old that they belong to a long-past era — a detail that quietly establishes how little the studio values its customers.
Q2. What is the photographer’s first judgement on the narrator’s face, and how does the narrator react?
Show Answer
The photographer examines him and announces that his face is wrong. The narrator is disconcerted rather than angry; he half accepts the verdict and begins to doubt a face he has lived with all his life, which shows how easily an ordinary person’s confidence can be undermined by an apparent expert.
Q3. List four instructions the photographer gives the narrator during the sitting. What is the cumulative effect?
Show Answer
He is told, among other things, to turn his head, roll his eyes, droop his ears, close his mouth, expand his lungs and hump his neck. The cumulative effect is comic and dehumanising at once: the man is being reassembled piece by piece, like material rather than a person.
Q4. What has the photographer done to the narrator’s features in the finished proof?
Show Answer
He has retouched the photograph out of all recognition — the eyebrows have been erased and redrawn, the mouth adjusted, and the hair redrawn away from the brow, leaving a smooth, pious-looking stranger in place of the narrator.
Q5. Why does the narrator break down at the end? Answer in about 60 words.
Show Answer
He breaks down because he realises that what he has been handed is not a likeness of himself at all. He is not complaining that the photograph is unflattering; he admits his features are poor. His grief is that those poor features are his own, he has had them all his life, and the photographer has erased them and expected gratitude for it. What he has lost is his dignity.
Q6. Identify two comic devices Leacock uses and give one example of each.
Show Answer
Hyperbole — the absurdly ancient magazines and the endless list of bodily corrections. Understatement — the narrator’s flat, apologetic tone as he reports treatment that would enrage most people. The gap between the two registers is the main source of the comedy.
Q7. “The photographer is indifferent rather than cruel.” Do you agree? Give reasons.
Show Answer
Yes. He shows no wish to hurt the narrator and no awareness that he has done so. His remarks about the face are delivered as neutral professional assessments, and he presents the retouched proof with genuine pride, expecting thanks. Cruelty requires attention to the victim; his failing is that the customer has stopped being a person to him altogether. That indifference is more damaging, and more precisely satirical, than cruelty would be.
Q8. How does the tone of the story change in its final paragraphs, and why is this important?
Show Answer
The tone shifts abruptly from farce to genuine hurt. Up to that point the reader has been invited to laugh; with the narrator’s protest and his tears the laughter is withdrawn. The shift is important because it reveals the story’s real subject — not the absurdity of a studio visit but the loss of individual dignity — and it converts a comic sketch into satire.
Q9. What does the photograph itself come to symbolise?
Show Answer
It symbolises a corrected, sanitised version of a human being: technically perfect and entirely false. Set against the narrator’s real face, it embodies the story’s central opposition between appearance and truth, and it stands for every attempt to improve a person by removing what makes them themselves.
Q10. “With the Photographer is not really about photography at all.” Discuss in about 200 words.
Show Answer
Agree, with a clear line of argument. The studio is a setting, not a subject. Leacock’s target is the professional who has grown so absorbed in his own expertise that the person in front of him disappears — a figure found in any consulting room, office or shop. Develop this in three moves. First, show how the photographer’s vocabulary belongs to the workshop: a face is wrong or right, wide or narrow, correctable. Second, show that his retouching is done in sincere good faith; he believes he is improving reality and expects gratitude, which is what makes him a satirical figure rather than a villain. Third, show that the narrator’s closing protest is about ownership of the self, not about picture quality — he concedes his features are poor and defends them anyway, because they are his. Conclude by noting that the tonal shift at the end confirms the wider subject: a story genuinely about photography would end with a bad photograph, whereas this one ends with a man in tears.
Aage kya? Treasure Chest ki pehli kahani ho gayi. Agli kahani The Elevator hai — bilkul alag mood, comedy ki jagah suspense. Lekin usse pehle ek kaam kijiye: is kahani ko dobara padhiye aur sirf photographer ke dialogues par nishaan lagaiye. Aap dekhenge ki wo ek baar bhi narrator se uski marzi nahin poochta. Wahi observation aapka poora answer khada kar deta hai.
Kaizen: Aaj se roz ek chhota kaam — kisi bhi prescribed story se ek chhota moment uthaiye aur do line mein likhiye ki wo moment kaunsa theme prove karta hai. Roz do line. Paanch kahaniyon ke baad aapke paas apne shabdon mein likha hua ek pura theme bank hoga, aur exam mein aapko kuch bhi yaad nahin karna padega.
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More ICSE Class 10 English Literature chapters — keep the momentum going.
Syllabus details verified from the CISCE prescribed-text list and English syllabus for the ICSE examination, published on cisce.org. All summary, character and theme analysis on this page is written in our own words; no publisher’s notes or questions have been used.