25Perfectly Dead Things

Perhaps you will say: But wait, how about design and composition, or, in painter’s lingo, organization and significant form? My answer is that these are words which, when they become formulated, signify, as a rule, perfectly dead things. [. . .] Composition, design, etc., cannot be fixed by rules, they are not in themselves a static prescription by which you can make a photograph or anything that has meaning. They signify merely the way of synthesis and simplification which creative individuals have found for themselves.

—Paul Strand

The first time I was invited to speak at a photography conference, I sat in the audience and watched other presenters deliver their talks, waiting for my turn to go on stage. A then-prominent photographer, speaking about composition, offered tips for making good landscape photographs, which, by his definition, are photographs that editors were likely to pick for publication. “A good photograph,” he stressed, “must have well-defined foreground, mid-ground, and background.” He then proceeded to show numerous examples of beautiful photographs that ostensibly “proved” the rule. This made me nervous. Trying to recall the photographs I included in my own slide deck, I was fairly certain that many did not, in fact, have well-defined foregrounds, mid-grounds, and backgrounds. The reason I was nervous was not that I thought my work was any worse for not following the rules, but because I was anxious about contradicting the words of this well-respected photographer on my very first public talk.

During the lunch break I decided to flip through my slides to assess just how defiant I was about to be. My memory served me well: of the thirty-eight photographs in my slideshow, none had a distinct foreground, mid-ground, and background—not even one! But it was too late to change, so, with some trepidation, I delivered my talk that afternoon. As it turned out, nobody in the audience even noticed that none of my photographs fit the composition “rules” presented earlier in the day—not even the photographer who presented them, who generously came over to congratulate me on my presentation and photographs.

In the years since, I learned an interesting thing: although tips and guidelines for photographic composition seem to be exceedingly popular among photographers, beyond perhaps the Rule of Thirds and a couple of other simplistic “rules,” nobody actually remembers those tips.

If you are among those who believe that such tips, rules, guidelines, or other recipes for “good compositions” or “great shots” are important, but feel guilty for not having memorized the ones you came across, you may breathe a sigh of relief—not because you are not alone in such negligence, but because by not memorizing such templates or adhering to them, you may unwittingly have spared yourself their potentially harmful effects.

Before explaining the reasons for why ignoring so-called rules of composition is a good thing, it’s worthwhile to know that the science of visual perception—how our brains make meaning from visual information—is fairly nascent. There is much that we don’t yet understand about how we know (or think we know) what we are looking at and how our brains decide how we should feel about what we see. This we do know: the majority of information coming into the brain from the visual system is discarded before we ever become conscious of it. To decide what is or isn’t worth paying attention to, our brains use mechanisms referred to in neuroscience as attention filters, and we are still a long way from understanding these mechanisms in any depth. Moreover, our perceptions of the world around us as derived from sensory information are not direct representations of what our senses detect, despite feeling like they are. In fact, our perception of “reality” at any given moment is a composite approximation generated by complex processes in the brain—a made-up story created to keep us alive and safe but not necessarily to inform us of everything that’s happening around us. Neuroscientists have a term for this approximate perception, too—one of my favorite expressions in any scientific field—controlled hallucination.

The upshot of all this is that anyone proclaiming to know of any “rules” of visual composition that alone make for “good” photographs, or even a majority of “good” photographs, is speaking out of ignorance or relying on anecdotal evidence. If such rules exist in any universal sense, we—human beings living in this time—can’t say exactly what they are. We do know that to the degree that such rules exist, they are far more complex and contingent upon many more factors than anything that can be reduced to a list of simple how-to tips.

Are there rules that, all other things being equal, can make a difference in which of a handful of possible compositions may be judged by a majority of viewers as more aesthetically pleasing than others? Perhaps. But in photography, all other things are very rarely equal. One composition may be more pleasing than another, but another composition may elicit a more powerful or altogether different emotional response, or draw the viewer’s attention to different elements in the frame, than the rule-based composition, making it hard to designate one as “better” than another. Such alternatives may not necessarily be prettier in the simplistic sense, but may be more desirable in other ways (e.g., they may be more expressive, more interesting, more mysterious, etc.). We can’t say that one composition is necessarily “better” than another without first asking, “better for what?” In particular, those who aspire to be expressive artists should be mindful of the fact that it’s very limiting if the only thing you know how to express in a photograph is, “here’s something pretty.”

Still, the greater risk of memorizing and consciously implementing templates, guidelines, or other “rules” of visual composition is not that that they may fail to impress viewers, but that they may inhibit or entirely suppress creativity. To follow rules is, literally, to not be creative—to not allow for possibilities outside of what’s already known or what’s been predetermined to be the only “correct” or desirable outcome(s).

Creative thought requires a state of mind known as cognitive disinhibition. To understand what this means, consider that much of what your brain does is not processing information but filtering out enormous amounts of information deemed unimportant. To give you a sense of just how much sensory information gets discarded before you become conscious of it, consider that around eleven million bits of information are sent to the brain from various sensory organs every second, of which you are conscious of only about fifty. There are also mechanisms in the brain that prevent information from being shared or combined in ways not deemed useful. This is the “inhibition” effect referred to in the word disinhibition. As far as your brain is concerned, given how limited it is in how many things it can pay conscious attention to, it makes no sense to, for example, recall a childhood memory of picking peaches in your uncle’s yard, when your attention is focused on making an apple pie from a recipe. In order for you to connect the dots between apples and peaches, and perhaps have an epiphany that you could make a peach pie instead of an apple pie, your brain must allow these two thoughts to occupy your consciousness at the same time—that is, it needs to not inhibit them from connecting, hence the term cognitive disinhibition. The same is true in situations when you may be focused on a recipe for making a “good” photograph—your brain will harness as much conscious attention as it can to implement the recipe, and inhibit thoughts it may consider irrelevant to the task, even if they may ultimately lead to better—as in, more original, more expressive, or more interesting—photographs.

When you consciously seek to implement the Rule of Thirds, for example, you are in essence instructing your brain to not even consider whether placing your subject in the center, or in any other part of the frame, may be conducive to a more expressive or more interesting photograph. In the same way, when you instruct your brain to look for leading lines, you are in essence instructing it to ignore random curves, squiggles, or shapes that may perhaps yield patterns more interesting than whatever some lines may lead to. More generally speaking, when you consciously attempt to apply a rule and make it the primary subject of your attention, you are telling your brain: don’t be creative, don’t consider alternatives, don’t throw anything into the mix that is not explicitly listed in the recipe. The harder you try to consider or follow some “rules,” the more likely you are to not notice compositions that do not fit within these rules but that might yield more interesting and engaging photographs.

In discussing this with photographers, I’m often told, “it’s still good to know the rules,” or, “the rules give you a good starting point.” No, they really don’t. What rules do is not help you be more creative or more expressive, but prejudice you toward a singular outcome. Rules lead—or, in psychological terms, prime—you to consider some options as more likely than others to result in better photographs, which may be true in some situations, but not if your goal is to make art, where “better” may mean a lot of different things.

Rules work by limiting your options, which is the opposite of what’s desirable to a creative artist. When it comes to visual composition, limiting your options to a set of prescribed templates is especially damaging since these limits are largely arbitrary. Whatever rules of visual perception may actually exist are likely far more numerous and complex than any simplified subset you may be able to memorize. But the good news is that you don’t have to memorize them. Whatever rules of visual perception exist, you already know them even if you can’t articulate them—they are encoded in your brain’s neural circuitry. Given a choice of several compositions, you can intuitively judge which is most visually appealing, which is more expressive of whatever concept you may wish to express, or which includes the least amount of distracting elements. You don’t need to apply rules consciously to know these things; what you need instead is to be able to visualize multiple options to choose from, to train and to force yourself to imagine consciously as many compositional possibilities as you can, so you can then make an informed choice by whatever subjective criteria fit what you’re after, whether it’s aesthetic appeal, expression, interest, or complexity.

Going for the obvious is a sure way to miss everything else. On the other hand, clearing your mind to free up attention, and then forcing yourself to think consciously of the many different ways you might compose a photograph from the elements and light available to you, the many different things you may express with these elements and light, and the many possible ways you may process your image after capturing it are the things that will yield you the most successful and creative compositions. This method of considering consciously as many possibilities as you can come up with in real time before deciding on the best one (i.e., not preconceiving what you will do in advance), is known as divergent thinking—a mode of thought conducive to creative solutions.

Lastly, another reason to avoid preconceived rules, templates, patterns, guidelines, etc., has to do with distinct types of attention. When you decide to focus your attention consciously on a task, such as looking for compositions that comply with some rule or pattern, you are using what’s known as top-down attention: you decide first what’s worthy of attention, then drive your attention toward that thing. This is different from attention that’s driven by responding to outside factors, which is known as bottom-up attention. For example, if you catch a glimpse of something interesting, your brain will automatically pay attention to that thing without making a conscious decision to do so. With bottom-up attention, you don’t decide in advance what you will pay attention to. Your attention is drawn to things your subconscious mind determines worthy for some reason—for example, by being colorful, aesthetically pleasing, potentially dangerous, or tempting. This type of attention often coincides with mindfulness—being aware of things, sensations, and feelings in the present moment—which is a beneficial trait in general, and is associated with mental and emotional wellbeing, but it is especially useful for expressive photographers, as our medium allows us to react and to make visual composition in response to unexpected things, and not just in preconceived ways fitting some contrived rules.