“I hope we will never see the day when photo shops sell little schema grills to clamp onto our viewfinders; and that the Golden Rule will never be found etched on our ground glass.” —Henri Cartier-Bresson
Above: Apneet Kaur, Rockaways; Photographs © Cory Rice
If the Internet provides any indication of how photography is imagined by its practitioners today, one could be forgiven for thinking a robot capable of churning out flawless pictures. Two characters share the brunt of the blame for the above conclusion: the gear fetishist and the composition guru. The former obsesses over technical specifications, often religiously buys one brand of camera or lens, and toils for hours brand-managing for free in the comment sections of photography websites, praising a lens so fast or ISO so high that you can shoot with the lights out—never minding who forgot to turn the lights on in the first place. The latter superimposes rigorous grids or scrawls elaborate arabesques across iconic photographs to illustrate the latest “school” of composition. With the various roles that the Internet has come to play as info source, soapbox, and echo chamber, this boisterous pair has become increasingly difficult to avoid. Neither personality is new—they are the byproducts of a medium that began as a scientific invention and spent the better part of a century vying for a seat in the fine art pantheon.
Advances in technology brought photography into being and continue to shape our idea of what a photograph is and can be. However, most photographers whose top priority is actually making pictures tend to avoid the cacophony of technical banter and squabble online. The greatest risk that the gear fetishist poses is within. Lost in minutiae, it becomes easy to miss the forest for the trees and forget to go out and take photographs.
Composition gurus pose a greater threat to the photography community at large on account of the Messianic persona that they adopt. Their identities hinge upon a self-appointed expertise on how to compose the perfect photograph and they will not rest until taken seriously—by everyone. The problem is not with the application of any particular model of composition but the prioritization of one approach to the exclusion of others. Most experienced photographers consciously or unconsciously make use of a range of strategies when composing an image. Nevertheless, there likely exists at least one picture in every photographer’s archive to which even the most obscure third-party composition system can retroactively be applied.
 |  |
Lower East Side
In order to understand whence the composition guru arrives, it helps to remember photography’s historical ties to design. After all, the camera obscura was a draughtsman’s tool before anyone thought to put light-sensitive paper inside of it. In 1435, the Italian architect and literal Renaissance man, Leon Battista Alberti, wrote Della Pittura (On Painting). His text formalized a system of perspective that came to shape the way Western artists represented their world for the next five centuries. In brief, Alberti’s program prioritized an “ideal” point of view that tricks viewers into perceiving depth in a flat canvas due to the careful modeling of space on the picture plane. A wedding of human perception and geometric principles, the system sought to create paintings that viewers could experience as though they were looking through windows.
It was not until the second half of the Nineteenth Century that European painters began, en masse, rejecting the window metaphor, embracing the materiality of their craft, and exploring the possibilities opened up by abstraction. This move away from mimetic painting would eventually lead to Cezanne’s radical experiments with form, Matisse’s scandalous liberation of color, and Kandinsky’s spiritual harnessing of both form and color. That the invention of photography slightly preceded this turn of events is of no small importance. Edgar Allan Poe, about a year after the first appearance of the daguerreotype, famously proclaimed:
“If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear—but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented. The variations of shade, and the gradations of both linear and aerial perspective are those of truth itself in the supremeness of its perfection.”
 |  |
Midtown
It would take until the early decades of the 20th Century for photographers to begin aggressively subverting the points of view that they had inherited from painting. Alexander Rodchenko’s jarring views of Russia, Man Ray’s uncanny renderings of bodies, and Germaine Krull’s abstractions of industrial production offer glimpses at the historical avant-garde’s mobilization of photography during this period. A second revolt directed squarely at the type of pictorial values proselytized by the composition guru occurred in the second half of the century, when artists working with photography turned either to conceptualism or amateurization to escape the vise-grip of formalism. By this point, “fine art”-minded photographers had transformed the once progressive aesthetics of the Pictorialists and Group f/64 photographers into tired clichés. Yet the composition guru trudged along, unfazed. For this reason, the phenomenon must be addressed ahistorically.
 |  |
Camélia Raji in the Rockaways
Suppressing the past century and a half of art production, we return to Alberti and perspective-based painting. When discussing photographic composition, it is important to acknowledge the debt that the mechanics of photography owes to perspectival theory and prior graphic forms. It is equally important to look beyond this point. The composition guru rarely does. The intersection of photography and painting becomes a green light to adopt (usually outmoded) strategies from the history of painting to compose photographs. The mathematical basis of Western perspective and its invention of an “ideal” point of view reappear in the form of arcane theorems or natural phenomena hijacked to explain why this or that composition “works.” Whether discussing the Rule of Thirds, the Golden Ratio, or one of the dime-a-dozen theories online, there inevitably comes a moment when the composition guru turns to quasi-mystical universals to justify the priority of the theory being promoted.
The more ridiculous the claim, the more likely it is to cite mathematical or scientific precedence to bolster credibility. A reckless iconoclast, the composition guru will cherry-pick examples from universally admired photographers to demonstrate the validity of the theory of the day, scribbling on photographs like a football announcer analyzing a touchdown pass. In the guru’s exhaustive “proofs,” readers learn that photographers as diverse as Walker Evans and Annie Leibovitz applied the same strategies of composition when creating their masterpieces. The dubious relationship between correlation and causation is never mentioned.
The desire that a successful photograph can be made in the same manner as a microwave dinner is never far beneath the surface of these theories. If you draw enough lines on a picture, its content will correspond to at least one of those lines. But again, the problem is less with the theories and more with their unbending adherence. The Rule of Thirds can be applied to many outstanding photographs. It can also be applied to many terrible photographs. It comes as no surprise that the most outspoken cheerleaders of a single rule of composition are often the first to fudge that rule to make an unruly but “good” photograph adhere.
When Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose work has suffered relentless abuse from composition gurus, expressed his anxiety over having grids attached to camera viewfinders, he was not discrediting the value of compositional awareness. Cartier-Bresson held strong beliefs on the subject: “Composition must be one of our constant preoccupations, but at the moment of shooting it can stem only from our intuition, for we are out to capture the fugitive moment, and all the interrelationships involved are on the move.” As important as Cartier-Bresson’s suggestion that the Golden Rule becomes a kind of internalized way of seeing, is the relationship between photography and the fourth dimension: time.
While painters build their compositions from a blank canvas, photographers, in all but the most controlled situations, must select from their environment what is registered by their camera and when. A photograph is simultaneously a conjunction and abstraction of space and time. This point is as important as it is obvious. It allows chance to enter the image. Of course, photographers possess the ability to moderate this variable to some extent by cropping an image. How a photographer chooses to crop, both spatially and temporally, will affect the audience’s reception of a photograph. Does an “ideal” image exist among a series of photographs? At what point does subjectivity take the reins? Leading lines, symmetry, framing, point of view, and the many other devices used for composing a photograph comprise a language to be navigated as a poet, not a stenographer.
Closing Quotes
“When subject matter is forced to fit into preconceived patterns, there can be no freshness of vision. Following rules of composition can only lead to a tedious repetition of pictorial clichés.” —Edward Weston
“[T]he artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of art history.” —Marcel Duchamp
“A picture is what it is and I’ve never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words. It wouldn’t make any sense to explain them. Kind of diminishes them. People always want to know when something was taken, where it was taken, and, God knows, why it was taken. It gets really ridiculous. I mean, they’re right there, whatever they are.” —William Eggleston
“There can be no objective rule of taste, no rule of taste that determines by concepts what is beautiful. For any judgment from this source is aesthetic, i.e., the basis determining it is the subject's feeling and not the concept of an object. If we search for a principle of taste that states the universal criterion of the beautiful by means of determinate concepts, then we engage in a fruitless endeavor, because we search for something that is impossible and intrinsically contradictory.” —Immanuel Kant
“Twenty ways to see the world… Twenty ways to start a fight.” —The Strokes
