With the Photographer by Stephen Leacock
Quick answer: With the Photographer by Stephen Leacock: complete summary including the ending, characters, themes of identity and image, and the craft of its final turn.
A man walks into a photography studio wanting nothing more than a picture of his own face, and walks out in tears because the photographer has decided his face will not do. Stephen Leacock published With the Photographer in 1913, in the collection Behind the Beyond, and the sketch has outlived the technology it mocks. It is short, it is savage about the business of improvement, and its last page swerves from farce into something unexpectedly sad.
Students usually meet this story as a lesson in humour and irony, and it works well that way. But read it again in an age of filters, retouching apps and profile pictures and it becomes almost uncomfortable. Leacock, writing when studio portraits were the only photographs most people ever had taken, saw exactly where the logic of enhancement leads: to an image of nobody, admired by no one who actually knows you.
The story in brief
The narrator arrives at a studio to have his photograph taken and is made to wait an hour while the photographer fusses behind a curtain. When the sitting finally begins, the photographer studies him and announces that the face is quite wrong. There follows a sequence of increasingly absurd instructions: turn the face, open the mouth and close it, droop the ears, roll the eyes in under the lids, expand the lungs. The narrator, insulted at first, gradually submits, and just as he gathers himself to protest properly, the picture is snapped mid-movement. He is told to return on Saturday for the proof.
Saturday comes, and the proof is a stranger. The eyebrows have been removed and will be redrawn, the hair has been changed, the mouth adjusted, the eyes corrected. Every feature the narrator recognised as his own has been improved out of existence. He delivers a quiet, furious speech: he came for a photograph of himself, plain as the face may be, something his friends might keep after he is gone, and what he has been offered is a polished fiction. He tells the photographer to keep the thing, to retouch it and finish it to his heart's content, since it clearly means more to the artist than it does to the subject. Then, and this is the ending students are asked about, the narrator breaks into tears and leaves the studio.
The characters
Two people, one collision of values. The narrator wants a truthful record of his own face, unremarkable as he admits it is; his modesty is genuine, which is what makes his final anger dignified rather than vain. The photographer wants a good photograph, and by his professional standards a good photograph is one that has been corrected. He is not cruel, and that is Leacock's slyest touch. He is enthusiastic, dedicated, even artistic. He simply cannot see that a portrait might exist for love rather than for polish, and his blindness does all the story's damage.
Themes and meaning
The exam readings name satire of vanity and appearance, the tyranny of professional expertise, and the conflict between authenticity and artifice. All are present. The photographer embodies a whole industry that profits by first convincing you that you are defective. The deeper theme is identity: the narrator's face, with its ordinary eyebrows and imperfect mouth, is the visible record of his life, and erasing its flaws erases him. When he says the picture should be something to remember him by, the sketch quietly reveals what portraits are actually for: not admiration but memory, not the market but the people who love us.
The sharper point is how the story distributes power. The customer is paying, yet from the first wasted hour to the final retouched proof he controls nothing. Leacock understood that expertise can be a form of bullying, that the phrase trust me, I know best can dismantle a person's ownership of their own image. That is why the piece has aged so well; the studio camera is gone, but the argument it staged is now in everyone's pocket.
The craft: farce that earns its sadness
Structurally the sketch is two scenes and a hinge. Scene one, the sitting, is pure escalating farce, and its comedy comes from the gap between the smallness of the event and the solemnity of the instructions. The list of demands grows more anatomically ridiculous in careful steps, and Leacock times the camera click to interrupt the narrator's rebellion, a beautifully judged anticlimax. Scene two, the proof, replays the same conflict in a colder key: the improvements are no longer requests made of a body but alterations made to an image, which the narrator cannot resist even by fidgeting.
The hinge is the final speech, where the prose drops its jokes almost entirely and lets the narrator speak plainly about death and remembrance before the abrupt last beat of tears. This is the technique worth stealing: comedy accumulates goodwill, and a writer who spends that goodwill on one honest paragraph can hit far harder than a story that was solemn throughout. The same pivot from laughter to feeling is precisely what the Emotional Impact and Structure marks reward in Writory's monthly Short Story Contest, which opens on 1 September 2026.
Why it feels so modern
Retouching in 1913 meant pencils and plates; today it means one tap. The sketch anticipates the entire modern anxiety about curated images: the sense that the version of you in circulation is smoother, brighter and less true than the one in the mirror. Teachers reaching for a contemporary angle can ask a simple question: if the photographer offered you the corrected picture today, on your favourite app, would you refuse it as the narrator did? The story's discomfort lies in knowing that most of us would not.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, define the irony precisely: a man goes to be photographed and receives a picture of someone who does not exist.
- Quote or cite the photographer's verdict that the face is quite wrong as the moment satire announces its target.
- Name the two-scene structure, sitting and proof, and show how the second scene repeats the first at a colder distance.
- Writers should study the ending: sustained farce buys the right to one sincere paragraph, and the story cashes it at the exact close.
- Use the modern parallel with photo filters carefully; anchor it in the text before extending it to today.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a character hires an expert for a simple personal service, a haircut, a CV rewrite, a dating profile, and the expert's improvements gradually replace the customer with someone unrecognisable. Let the customer win the argument and lose something anyway.
Questions
What is the theme of With the Photographer?
The story satirises the cult of improvement and defends authenticity over polish. Leacock shows that a portrait exists to preserve a real person for the people who love them, and that retouching away every flaw erases identity itself.
What happens at the end of With the Photographer?
Seeing the proof retouched beyond recognition, the narrator tells the photographer to keep the picture and finish it however he likes, since it no longer has anything to do with him. He wanted an honest likeness for his friends to remember him by, and he breaks into tears and leaves the studio.
Why does the narrator cry at the end of the story?
His tears come from humiliation and grief rather than vanity. He accepted his plain face as his own, and the photographer's corrections told him that his real self was not worth recording.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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