The True History of “The Rule of Thirds”

It’s neither as old nor as important as you think

by M. H. Rubin, with research by Dr. Gina Talley

Before we can discuss our admiration for, or loathing of, the “rule of thirds,” I think it’s fair to reveal its true history, trying to skip most of the emotionality we get around the topic. 

I grew up in a home filled with photography and hundreds of photo books of all kinds; I’d enjoyed learning from dozens of photographers and I’d been taking pictures since I was a kid in the late 1960s — and yet I never heard the expression “rule of thirds” nor seen all the lines and grids in photography until well after college, probably not until the 1990s. And it didn’t fit with anything I understood about taking pictures. So how was that possible for me to have missed such an important, popular, and apparently ancient set of ideas? I spent some time trying to figure that out. This is the rabbit hole.

Deep Background

According to Wikipedia, the first use of the term the “rule of thirds” was in 1797. In his book Remarks on Rural Scenery, John Thomas Smith discussed the balance of dark and light in a painting, and called it the “Rule of thirds.” He was saying that when given a chance, in pretty much anything that can be divided up, the proportion of ⅓ to ⅔ is more pleasing than other proportions. I think this is true. This is not, however, how the expression is used today.

From the dawn of photography in the 1830s and continuing for more than 150 years, discussions of photography very rarely included references to geometric compositional rules. It’s no wonder I fully missed it growing up. A comprehensive search through the textbooks, magazines, newspapers, and essays about photography from the 1830s to the 1990s surprisingly found only isolated references to these ideas — so the following exploration has to consider both when the ideas were proposed, how they morphed, and when they were finally adopted in photographic education.

One of the earliest discussions on photographic composition came from a popular book by photo pioneer Henry Peach Robinson in 1869 — the guy on the left in the Uelsmann tub, above. In it, Robinson emphasized the value of moving the point of interest out of the center of the frame, noting that “if it be an important object, it will never be found exactly in the centre….” 

The prevailing feeling at that time was that photography produced a mechanical reproduction of the world, devoid of creativity. Robinson, however, felt photography could be art. His book drew heavily on ideas from painting, making connections between the two forms; it was foundational to what would soon be called “pictorialism” — and he popularized the idea that if photography was going to be seen as art it needed to emulate the aesthetics of paintings.

For the pictorialists, one didn’t just push the button; it usually took additional work to transform a snap into “art-photography.” To accomplish this they employed a variety of techniques: softening sharpness, using special papers and emulsions, hand-coloring prints, and combining negatives to create montages (the reason Uelsmann honored them in his “self portrait”). They often chose subjects that were allegorical or mythological and meticulously posed elements and settings to create more formal compositions. In that era, camera exposures were long, which meant subjects were usually not in motion, and consequently, were placed purposefully and by design.

The Origin of a “Rule”

In 1908, at the height of photographic pictorialism, a photography textbook formalized Robinson’s suggestion, in what is likely the first actual account of the (as-yet-unnamed) phenomena:

The Principle Object of Interest — There must be a principle object of interest in the picture; and that object must be put in the right place, not only in regard to the spacing of the negative, but also in relationship to the other details of the picture. For this purpose, you will find it an excellent plan to rule your ground-glass in the manner indicated on the accompanying diagram. The crosses indicate positions of strength, the weakest part of the space is the center. The principle object of interest, therefore, should be placed very close to where the lines intersect; that is to say, near but not in, the middle of the picture. [emphasis added]

Here, in its original form, it was not a bad rule of thumb. It was not using math or geometry, and only suggested that photographers move subjects out of the center, and toward the edge. It was appropriately soft in its proposal: place the main object “very close” to the cross spots. 

Interestingly, a grid of thirds wasn’t the only way to visualize the idea. Distinguished poet and art critic Sadakichi Hartmann, a sometime contributor to Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work, wrote his own pictorialist textbook on these topics in 1910, and presented the same rule but in a different way, suggesting students place the point of interest “never exactly in the center or very near to it” and “somewhere near the lower corners of the dotted square [in Diag 16]”:

These represented the introduction of the idea. 

But as the century progressed, faster film and newer cameras meant moments in motion could be frozen, and pictorialism was replaced by modernism and its more natural approach to shooting. The evolution of ideas was shifting differently in the US and in UK. Where American modernists were rejecting the old approaches, the British continued to have lingering attachment to pictorialist geometry. Besides being repeated in a textbook by a British pictorialist in 1920 with the “thirds” grid, the concept lay dormant for decades in the US, while it remained an ongoing conversation in the journals of British photographers.

In 1942 the idea was mentioned again, an isolated case, but this time significant only because the name “rule of thirds” was finally attached, formalized in the US after years of more colloquial use by English pictorialists:

The position of the center of interest is of considerable importance. In general, the geometrical center is the poorest place. However, in some pictures, particularly those of a religious nature, the geometrical center is the most pleasing because it lends itself to formal arrangement. In most pictures, the region about any one of the four points indicated [the cross spots] is the best location for the center of interest. This might be called the rule of thirds, since these points are one-third the height of the picture up from the bottom or down from the top, and one-third the length of the picture in from the sides. When in doubt, it is a greater fault to place the center of interest too close to the edge of the picture than too near the center. [emphasis added]

From 1869 to 1942 this compositional tip was the same: that a subject could be stronger when moved out of the center and toward (but not too near) the edge — what I’d call the actual rule. It’s a strange instruction, because it’s frequently pointed out that subject can be okay in either position, sometimes. At best you’d call it a tip. 

Of course this reasonable advice to the beginner — composition involves moving the frame around a scene, and leaving a point of interest in the center can be dull and obvious. It’s easy to see both what the authors intended, and how it could easily be misconstrued. Regardless, even by 1942, as modernism was in full force, these formal ideas were minor aspects of teaching photography.

A Lone Voice in the Darkness

There’s not much known about Richard Neville Haile. He was born in 1895 in Sussex, England, where he would spend his entire working life — he was a photographer in the pictorialist tradition and by the 1920s was developing his business doing portraiture. His credits included Fellow (and later president) of the Institute of British Photographers, Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, and exhibitor at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. 

While information on Haile says he was a “photographer and painter,” the painting he did seems to be limited to the painting of miniatures. But in spite of the thin record, he published an influential book on pictorialist photography that had some interesting assertions. He felt modernist photographers weren’t planning or composing, and just “got lucky” in the instant of their shot. The planning was the art of photography.

The first edition of Composition for Photographers: A Course of Instruction in the Art and Science of Composition as Applied to Portrait and Landscape Photography came out in 1937, and went through seven editions between 1937 and 1952. The book is totally based on a painterly approach (and is mostly illustrated with paintings). He doesn’t discuss the rule of thirds (either in concept or by name), possibly because that tip was specific to photography, and his lessons and examples seem to come entirely from painting. 

Unique, however, was an application of the proportions in the Golden Mean to formal composition. In that section of his book, he accurately explained its math, attributed it to Pythagoras, and went on to sum up how it should be used: “we have touched upon the question of Proportion, the Golden Mean; and have seen how important is the Placing of our subject in the picture space…”

Cartier-Bresson Warned Us

It is in this era that the distinguished photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson, in his landmark photographic treatise The Decisive Moment (1952) took a position — not on the rule of thirds, but on the rigid approach to painterly schemas in photographic composition. Cartier-Bresson, as well as being a pioneer in photojournalism, was a trained painter and his book frequently illustrated the differences between painting and photography. He was likely familiar with the British textbook by Haile, an approach to photography that Cartier-Bresson would have found irksome. He literally begged his readers to ignore such pictorialist approaches in picture taking, and trust instincts:

In applying the Golden Rule, the only pair of compasses at the photographer’s disposal is his own pair of eyes. Any geometrical analysis, any reducing of the picture to a schema, can be done only (because of its very nature) after the photograph has been taken, developed, and printed — and then it can be used only for a postmortem examination of the picture. I hope we will never see the day when photo shops sell little schema grills to clamp onto our viewfinders; and the Golden Rule will never be found etched on our ground glass. [emphasis added]

Cartier-Bresson was making a directed dig at Haile’s approach as he made the poetic allusion that the only application of the Golden Rule is through the photographer’s eyes. He was not only referring to Haile, but any formal schema, any geometrical organization of the elements in a photo. He’s saying if you want order, it comes from you. He’s building his case for the “decisive moment” when the photographer reveals inexplicable order and visual harmonies in the chaos of life.

The 1955 British Journal of Photography also pushed back against these lingering pictorialist ideas; it says in one essay: “Do we go around looking for that famous ‘S’ bend known in the best circles as Hogarth’s Line of Beauty? Have we studied the rule of ‘Thirds’ as delineated by Pythagoras? Do we cut the picture into two halves by means of the horizon line? All these points have much to do with the answer as to what is a good print.” It’s an argument against geometry and pictorialism but it makes an important mistake: it was the first time someone conflated the rule of thirds and the Golden Mean. In many ways, it was a mistake waiting to happen.

Haile doesn’t mention the rule of thirds in his works (although he does have some discussion of proportions in landscapes) but he was the one to attribute the Golden Mean to Pythagoras (entirely wrong; it was first described by Euclid in his book Elements in 300 BCE).

The “Golden Mean,” (aka: phi, the Golden Rectangle, the Golden Section, Golden Ratio, and the associated Golden Spiral) is a fascinating observation from Ancient Greece and later connected to the adjacent pairs in the Fibonacci Series. It shows up in nature and the way some things grow; it has been adopted into art and architecture. The Golden Mean is a very important ratio of ~1.618 to 1. But the Golden Mean is unequivocally and fundamentally distinct from the rule of thirds.

Confusion in the 1950s

Something happened in the 1950s to change the narrative and it’s difficult to nail down who was most at fault. The Golden Mean was now sometimes confused with the rule of thirds. The mistakes were small, until they weren’t. 

Carleton Wallace, as well as being a crime novelist, penned dozens of self-help books across a range of popular topics, including: The Book of Flying (1948), Boy’s Book of Hobbies (1951), The Boy’s Book of Sport (1951), Reminders for Club Secretaries and Treasurers (1952), Ideas for Your Garden (1953). In 1953–1954 he started a new series, “pocket books” beginning with one on photography, quickly followed by pocket books for Gardeners, Shorthand-Typists, Housewives, Motor Cyclists, Business Men, Travellers, and (gulp) Home Doctors. 

If that range wasn’t impressive enough, he was also writing about photography. In all, Wallace released at least ten books on the topic; besides his initial pocket book, there was Enjoy your Photography (1954), Photography all the Year Round (1955), The Complete Book of Photography (1958), Making Photography Pay (1959), The Junior Photographer (1961), Photographing People (1962), Photography (1963), The Complete Book of Color Photography (1963), and The New Photographer (1964).

In his early photography books he hardly mentioned any rules, and only suggested moving the subject out of the center toward those lines and cross-hairs. In The Complete Book of Photography (1958) we first see an important modification in the way he describes his “rule of thirds” tip. While it remained unnamed here, he endorsed the subtle shift in emphasis from moving a subject from the center (which he also stated) to a more exacting placement on the crosshairs — “the points where the thirds intersect are strong positions for the placing for the most important part of the subject…” His shift wasn’t out of the blue—throughout the prior decades, articles in British photography journals might have described the rule this way. But Carlton had a popular audience.

He was appropriately fuzzy about the the thirds in some ways, and also was clear that composition was “to a large extent a personal thing” and “you need not follow the rules slavishly,” although his caveat was that it’s personal unless you want to appeal to a larger audience, and then you must follow the rules.

By the 1950s the prevailing wisdom on the topic from the few working pictorialists was to move subjects out of the center of photos, the more reasonable rule of thirds. While Haile had proposed that positioning of elements in frame should follow the proportions of the Golden Mean, that specific pictorialist notion was unrepeated and impossible to find mentioned in any other writings. The bulk of photographic interest was with the modernists, and a style articulated by Cartier-Bresson that dispelled the myths of these formal notions. But the mistake was initiated.

Artists and academics still paid little attention. A review of the distinguished photography journal Aperture shows no conversations regarding any of these topics — the Golden Mean, the rule of thirds, and so forth—throughout the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. 

By 1959, however, the augmented version started to show up in other publications, even as experts tried to push back. 

For example, a textbook Basic Photography (1959) appropriately mentioned the rule of thirds in passing, in its original form (with no mention of the Golden Ratio): 

Place your subjects by the “rule of thirds.” This rule says that the natural center-of-interest in a picture frame occurs above or below the centerline, and off to one side. Really, this is the easiest thing in the world to follow. Line a picture up in your viewfinder. Then see if you can move the camera just enough to right or left to throw the center-of-interest toward one of the picture’s corners.

Second, and more entertainingly, Iowa State University students created an educational film about photographic composition—and described the “rule” in detail. But they also conflated it with the Golden Ratio. In the film the narrator says, “the Greeks, thousands of years ago, discovered that the most pleasing arrangement of space to the eye was in a 2 to 1 ratio.”

The entire video is comical, almost a parody, with an assortment of guidelines and illustrated with the student’s own photos with their somewhat arbitrary rules. 

And finally, the Royal Photographic Society produced This Year’s Photography 1959 and mentioned both the rule and the Golden Mean: 

No art form can flourish when it is restricted. So let us forget all about what the critics and judges said during the winter months, forget about the magical “golden mean” and “two-thirds,” forget all about the picture that someone else made of the three trees on the hill. If you love trees you will wish to photograph them, trying to portray their majesty or strength or beauty. Do it your way…

1959 was the watershed year for the meme. The Iowa kids’ project would seem to be the most egregious conflation of these two ideas, but the film would have been almost impossible for anyone outside of the university to see, and likely wouldn’t have been the source of a rippling problem. The seeds were sewn, but even with all these isolated mentions in popular culture, this simple rule of thumb wasn’t spreading into photographic discussions; it was consistently and academically ignored for a couple more decades. Except from Carlton Wallace, who leaned into it. From his 1963 book Photography:

The worst parts of any frame in a pictorial sense are (i) the exact centre [sic], and (ii) close to the edges. The reasons are that when the eye is looking at the exact centre of any subject its attention is free to wander in any direction— it is not drawn in some specific direction as required for full appreciation of the subject — and when it is looking at detail close to an edge its tendency is to wander off that edge.

While Wallace was always appropriately hedging on the precision of placing a subject somewhere, he did what no one had done much of, which was to articulate why this was happening, and that was a creative leap. Using the Golden Mean as some historic and creative rationale propped up his argument.

But as we got to the 1960s, the rule of thirds was still fringe, and the rule itself was relatively imprecise.

The US Military

In 1965, as the Vietnam War was ramping up, these ideas were percolating into the military. It was from the military’s guides that composition training was getting augmented by lessons from pictorialist geometry, ideas largely adapted from Haile’s work. Students were told curved lines were “expressing beauty and grace” and horizontal lines would cause “a feeling of peace, quiet and repose,” and so forth. The military’s initial version of the rule of thirds was a hybrid of the original and Wallace’s shift: “…photographers use what is known as the ‘Rule of Thirds’ formula, which dictates that the principal object(s) be placed off-center.” If they had stopped, it would have at least been correct, but they continued: “Divide the picture area into imaginary thirds. Split the picture with principle subject at one intersection.” Regardless, it was still relegated to a small section of the instruction.

In 1973 the Navy doubled down on this, and adopted a somewhat-official version of the rule of thirds in training materials for journalists learning photography. It also added the use of “leading lines,” another pictorialist notion. 

But by 1979 the Army had expanded it and re-merged it with the Golden Mean (aka Golden Rectangle):

The rule of thirds, also called the Golden Rectangle, divides the field of view by threes. In photography this is a mental division of the frame into three areas along vertical and horizontal axis. The photo subject is normally placed at any one of the four intersection points of the imaginary division lines depending on subject size, direction and theme of the photo.

Photography Reaches the General Public 

The rule of thirds, even in its bastardized form, might have languished in obscurity if it were not for the explosive rise in consumer and amateur photography that was about to begin.

The modular Nikon F (1959) pioneered the SLR (single lens reflex) camera; it included a number of important features (a built-in light-meter, for instance, and a new mechanism to use interchangable lenses) that made it practical and easy; and importantly, for focusing, it offered a split-image rangefinder in the center of the frame — the focusing spot. 

Nikon’s success led to other SLR cameras from Pentax and Canon in the 1960s that imitated and refined the approach; the development of AE (automatic exposure) and the release of faster film stocks all helped the general public get into photography and the numbers began to climb.

The new amateurs would frequently place the focus spot on someone’s nose and leave it there, in the center of the frame, resulting in awkward and repetitive compositions. As camera manufacturers had invested interest in selling more cameras (and in consumers having better photos), it made good business sense to help folks shift up their compositions; the rule of thirds found fertile ground here. 

It is over this period that there were isolated mentions of both the original and distorted rule, and it was working it’s way into academia, albeit slowly. 

Time/Life, arguably the leading institution promoting photography at the time, produced a popular series of 17 volumes on the topic in 1971, but even in the volume covering the Art of Photography, there was no mention of any geometric principles in the sections on composition. 

The 1974 textbook Photographic Composition neither mentions the rule of thirds nor the Golden Mean, but instead advised students to ignore these “rules you’ve been exposed to” and to “observe these placements with an unprejudiced mind.” Similarly, the 1974 Encyclopedia of Photography, a 20-volume set, with contributions from a host of distinguished (and by today, historically relevant) photographers, has no mention of either of these geometric schema.

At the other extreme, however, the 1976 textbook Photographic Composition Simplified went heavy into the Golden Mean (describing it with a jumbled history) but never mentioned the rule of thirds. It does, however conclude with the caveat: “it seems advantageous to apply the [Golden Mean] rule when shooting quiet subjects, such as landscapes, still lifes, portraits, buildings, street scenes, and the like; but when the photograph presents movement, emotion, excitement or action, the rule may be disregarded.”

And by December 31, 1978 the Camera editor at the New York Times, Roger Snyder, ended the year with the essay “The Old Masters Did Not Follow Definite Rules,” making a case against using schema, as Cartier-Bresson had urged. By the end of the 1970s it felt like the photo industry was working hard to squelch these misguided ideas, but there was pressure from amateur culture and consumer pragmatism to help people take less boring snapshots (as well as to have fodder for educational content).

The rule had now shifted. Between the start and end of the 20th century, the rule went from sometimes move the subject out of the middle, but not too near the edge to put the subject on a cross-hairs; similar, but definitely not the same instruction, and certainly making it problematic.

Still, use was nominal and generally an aside in discussions of composition. The popular Nikon School, thriving in the early ’80s, didn’t include this thinking in their public outreach workshops and books. But by the end of the decade, built on the pervasiveness of the SLR combined with a new culture of novice photographers, the rule truly became established as the foundation for learning photographic composition, falsely described as fundamental for the pictorialists, and backed up by a great fake history from the Greeks.

A 1992 issue of Popular Photography had this amalgam of facts and misinformation to spread, and is typical of the mythology that persists today:

“Ever since Joseph Nicéphore Niépce pointed his camera out the window and made the world’s first photograph circa 1827, photographers have concerned themselves with the best way to arrange the image they were capturing.

Common sense “rules of thumb” — a body of conventional tips — soon arose, including such advice as “Keep the horizon line straight” and “Avoid placing background objects so they seem to be growing out of the subject’s head.” Also from the beginning, attempts were made to work out methods of composition based on aesthetic theory. Photographers known as pictorialists were very influential, and their ideas linger on even today. They sought to achieve ideal beauty in their pictures and believed the best way to do this was to imitate the neoclassical or academic style of painting favored by contemporary art institutions, such as the Royal Academy in England.

They based their method on the prestigious “golden mean” of classical antiquity and the Italian Renaissance; the ratio between a whole and its parts deemed most pleasing to the human eye. It is achieved by dividing a line (or an area) so that the smaller part is to the larger part, as the larger part is to the whole. This approximates a ratio of 8 to 13, 3 to 5 or, less exactly ⅓ to ⅔.

From this concept, pictorialists derived the famous “rule of thirds” which advises that for the most pleasing composition, the picture area should be divided into ⅓ and ⅔ sections horizontally, vertically, or better yet, both.

It’s challenging to unpack the ways this twisted the history: the “famous ‘rule of thirds’ which advises that for the most pleasing composition, the picture area should be divided into ⅓ and ⅔ sections” was oddly closer to the original original use of the term, from the painter John Thomas Smith in 1797; that was not what the Greeks had noticed, and it was not how the expression had been used in the 20th century, and the pictorialists didn’t base their compositions on the Greek principle, nor did they base their tip to move subjects out of the center on any of these ideas, although it was a “painterly” way to approach a subject. The passage seems mostly to be referring to Haile — it was his background with the Royal Academy that lent some credibility to his Golden Mean approach, but it was neither a method used by pictorialists nor was it foundational to the development of the rule of thirds.

Regardless, from this and countless other books and articles throughout the ’80s and ’90s, the new rule ossified into conviction.

By conflating the rule of thirds with the Golden Mean, the soft rule of thumb was imbued with a charge of mathematical exactitude and the respectability of history.

Recap

1. The expression “rule of thirds” was coined in 1797, but to mean something else. This was not the origin.

2. The actual origin of the (unnamed) photo tip was in 1908 at the height of pictorialism formality, but only to help photographers move subjects out of the center of an image towards an edge, but not too near.

3. Over the ‘30s and ‘40s it was a small and lingering aspect of British pictorialist thinking. In 1942 it was named and codified for a wide audience.

4. Pictorialist Richard Neville Haile introduced the use of the Golden Mean to photography in the 1940s, but it was unrelated to the rule of thirds, and it was vehemently argued against by Cartier-Bresson in 1952.

5. Pop-author Carleton Wallace popularized the erroneous version of the rule of thirds that had been floating around quietly. In 1963 he conflated it with the Golden Mean — the first significant author to do so.

6. The amalgamated version was largely ignored, but due to adoption by US military, got amplified for decades, out of the view of the public.

7. The amalgamated version still languished until the 1980s when it crept into more textbooks and photographic hobbyist magazines, and by the 1990s was enshrined as dogma.

Conclusions

The rule of thirds evolved in a world where photography was very slow and the positioning of elements in the frame — usually portraits or landscapes — were highly considered. Modernism rendered it moot because fast film and newer camera technology allowed for more dynamic content and composition became entirely instinctual. And while the modernists would certainly ignore a schema approach, even the pictorialists were quick to point out that you couldn’t really follow a form, in spite of their desire for formality.

I just walk around, observing the subject from various angles until the picture elements arrange themselves into a composition that pleases my eye. 

— André Kertész (1974)

Formal schema of any kind ignore an important and fundamental aspect of photography: the things in the frame are not geometric objects with Cartesian coordinates, but complex shapes with meanings and associations. The way the human eye scans a scene is certainly dominated by the lighting, but it’s generally understood to be driven by knowledge and culture — what we know drives what we see. The brain fills in incomplete information. And the photographer is a master of giving viewers various kinds of incomplete information (a flattened and cropped view, a blurry or darkened element, the interpretation of a facial expression, etc.) for them to experience. Objects have relationships with each other, juxtapositions have multiple meanings. All of these drive photographic compositions, and none are based on geometric forms. 

Nathan Lyons, Director of the Visual Studies Workshop, wrote an essay on “Landscape Photography” in the 1974 Encyclopedia of Photography. In it he focused on a critique of John Burnet and his work A Treatise on Painting (1880), a popular textbook for painters that was later adopted by pictorialist photographers. The leader of the Naturalistic School of Photography, P.H. Emerson, openly and repeatedly attacked Burnet and his “traditional considerations of geometric perspective and composition”: 

In short, the whole work is illogical, unscientific, and inartistic, and has not a leg to stand on. It is specious to say that all compositions are made according to geometrical forms; nothing can be easier than to take arbitrary points in a picture and draw geometrical figures adjoining them. The [triangle] is a favorite geometric form of composition. Now take any picture, and take any three points you like, and join them, and you will have a [triangle], as does every composition contain a [triangle], as does a donkey’s ear.

It’s convenient to instruct a beginner to “put” something in a specific place. On average, especially with a relatively empty backdrop, this can improve a scene. But it doesn’t explain why — it’s not what photographers do — it’s just sometimes something that happens. 

Current textbooks on photography continue to repeat the rule of thirds/Golden Mean connection, often doubling down on its importance and longevity, when in fact it has neither. It even spawned a cottage industry of “rules” of composition connected to geometric forms, unrelated to how the human visual system works and equally unrelated to the ways interesting photographs are composed.

While there are similarities, photography is not an application of graphic design principles. The Golden Spiral (and other geometric guides) were appended relatively recently, and by accident. In spite of their lazy appeal (and how cool pictures look when you superimpose all the lines on them) these rules are unrelated to understanding photographic composition and probably make the actual development of compositional skills harder to articulate. While graphical artists might use these ratios as a scaffolding for design and painting, photos aren’t built from a scaffolding, and instead are a complex world winnowed down with a camera. 

In Pictorial Effect in Photography (1869) H.P. Robinson wrote, “As the science of photography has its formulae, so has the art of picture-making, in whatever material, its rules.” Art historian Beaumont Newhall, in his work The History of Photography (1964) responded: “This regimentation of photographic esthetics and confusion of media caused damage still felt.”

Once the notion of geometric schema is placed in a student’s head, it can be very difficult to unlearn it to begin to explore what photographers are actually doing when they take pictures. But this is precisely the nature of these schema in education today: learn them, then you can forget them.

Teaching Composition

I believe the issue is less about the rule of thirds than it is “if not this, than what?” How do you explain how photographers unconsciously compose their images? How do you teach a feeling? It seems like the right question to ask.

I cannot repeat often enough that composition can not be taught. Only a few facts can be given, and hints and suggestions how to utilize them.

 — Sadakichi Hartmann (1910)

It’s been a thorny issue for more than a century; difficult enough that educators grope for any kind of mythology to cling to. That is where our work lies, to find better ways to explain the elements of compelling photographs and the way photographers do what they do. I don’t agree that it cannot be taught, only that it can’t be taught through geometry.

In 1955, Aperture magazine had an editorial arguing for a new language for photography, quickly focusing on “composition”:

We apply the word “composition” (borrowed from painting mainly) to photographs. This does not describe the action of a photographer isolating a picture on a ground glass or through a view finder with any accuracy whatsoever. Is there a word that will really describe what goes on?

My new approach to teaching photographic composition is an alternative. The Art of Composition — Reimagined, with the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops, is available this August.

Excerpted from Rubin’s upcoming book on photographic composition, The Art of Composition — Reimagined © 2024 MH Rubin, All Rights Reserved.

This work is a collaboration with Villanova history professor Dr. Gina Talley, whose efforts and research skills were invaluable. If you find additional references to these issues, this is a working document, our best understandings at this time, and happy to continue to refine as information is discovered.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, Ansel. “Geometrical Approach to Composition.” In The Encyclopedia of Photography: The Complete Photographer: The Comprehensive Guide and Reference for All Photographers, edited by Willard D. Morgan, vol. 9. New York: Grestone Press, 1974.

“A Name For It,” Aperture, Winter 1955.

Cartier-Bresson, Henri. The Decisive Moment. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952.

Cartier-Bresson, Henri. Images à la Sauvette. Paris: Editions Verve, 1952.

Clements, Ben and David Rosenfeld. Photographic Composition. New York: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1974.

Defense Information School. Applied Journalism Handbook. 2nd ed. Fort Benjamin Harrison, IN: Defense Information School, Nov. 1965.

Department of the Army. Journalist: The Soldier’s Manual. Washington, DC: Department of the Army, Headquarters, Oct. 1979.

Eisenstaedt, Alfred. Eisenstaedt’s Guide to Photography: A Studio Book. New York: Viking Press, 1978.

Evans, David. “Richard H. Haile — Photographer.” The Magic Lantern 28, September 2021.

Goldsmith, Arthur. “Composition: Are There Any Rules?” Popular Photography, July 1992.

Haile, Richard Neville. Composition for Photographers: A Course of Instruction in the Art and Science of Composition as Applied to Portrait and Landscape Photography. London: Fountain Press, 1939.

Haile, Richard Neville. Composition for Photographers: A Course of Instruction in the Art and Science of Composition as Applied to Portrait and Landscape Photography. London: Fountain Press, 1952.

Hammond, Arthur. Pictorial Composition in Photography. Boston: American Photographic Publishing Co., 1920.

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