Describe a Photograph You Like
A Band 8 sample answer for the IELTS Part 2 photograph cue card, showing how to describe an image without listing what is in it, plus Part 3 questions on memory and images.
Cue Card
Describe a photograph you like.
You should say:
- what the photograph shows
- when it was taken
- who took it
And explain why you like this photograph.
The failure mode on this card is obvious once you hear it: candidates list the contents of the image. There is a tree on the left, my brother is standing in the middle, the sky is blue. Two minutes of inventory and no story.
A photograph is interesting because of what happened either side of the shutter. The answer below spends most of its time there, and only describes the image itself for about twenty seconds.
Model Answer
Band 8There's a photo on my desk that I've had framed for about six years now, and it's not a good photograph in any technical sense. It's slightly out of focus and half of my father's head is cut off.
It was taken at my sister's graduation, so that would have been June, maybe 2018. My mother took it on her phone and she's genuinely terrible with cameras, which is why the framing is so bad. In the picture my sister is mid-laugh with her cap falling off, my father has his hand out trying to catch it, and I'm at the edge looking at neither of them because I was checking the time.
What makes it worth keeping is the ten seconds before it. We had been arguing in the car the entire way there about something completely pointless, I think about parking, and everybody arrived in a foul mood. Then the cap fell off and the whole thing collapsed. My mother took the photo without looking at the screen, which is why it's crooked.
So I like it because it's honest, I suppose. All the other photos from that day are the posed kind where everyone has arranged their face, and they could be anyone's family. This one you can see the argument in, if you know it's there. I've noticed I keep it partly as a reminder that the good moments usually aren't the planned ones, which sounds like something off a greeting card, but in this case it happens to be true.
Why This Answer Works
- It describes the image in one compact paragraph and spends the rest on context. That ratio is what separates a story from an inventory.
- The imperfections carry the answer. Out of focus, half a head missing, crooked framing. Nobody memorising a script would invent a photograph that is bad.
- The past perfect does real work. "We had been arguing in the car" places the argument clearly before the photograph, which is exactly the tense contrast examiners listen for.
- It catches its own cliche. Flagging that the conclusion sounds like a greeting card and then defending it anyway is a very human move that no rehearsed answer contains.
Key Phrases to Steal
“not a good photograph in any technical sense”
Qualifying phrase that narrows a claim precisely.
“that would have been June”
Modal perfect for estimating a past date. Very natural and often missing at Band 6.
“mid-laugh”
Compact compound that captures an instant. Sounds spoken, not written.
“the whole thing collapsed”
Figurative use of a plain verb to describe a mood breaking.
“which sounds like something off a greeting card”
Self-aware hedge before a sentimental point. Buys credibility.
Part 3 Follow-Up Questions
Do people take too many photographs now?
Almost certainly, though I'm not sure it's the disaster people claim. The old constraint was the film roll, twenty-four shots and a cost to developing them, so you thought before pressing the button. Now the cost is zero and the thinking has gone with it. What I do think has been lost is the sorting. Nobody edits their camera roll, so ten thousand photos exist and none of them get looked at, whereas a small album from 1985 gets opened at every family gathering.
Is it better to look at a photograph or to rely on your memory?
They do different jobs and I'd want both. A photograph is accurate about the surface, what people wore, how young they looked, and memory is unreliable about all of that. But memory holds what the day felt like, and no image captures that. There's a risk with photographs that they overwrite the memory entirely, so eventually you only recall the framed second rather than the afternoon around it.
How has photography changed the way people travel?
It has reordered the priorities, I'd say, and not always sensibly. You now see places where the queue is not for the view but for the specific spot the view is photographed from, which suggests the picture has become the point rather than the record. Against that, photography has made obscure places visible to people who would never have found them, and some of those places have survived economically because of it. So the effect is genuinely mixed rather than simply bad.
Now Try It Out Loud
Reading a model answer is one thing — saying it under pressure is another. Practise this exact cue card with our AI examiner and get instant band-score feedback.