Read This If You Want to Take Great Photographs

Breaking the rules

Throw the rule book out the window

For other examples:

Lee Friedlander p. 71

Daido Moriyama p. 79

Robert Capa p. 105

Robert Frank p. 121

Everything about this image by Bill Brandt is so wrong.

First, our eyes are pulled out of the image by the path on the right. Then there’s that off-kilter lamppost, awkwardly making contact with the very top of the frame. And look how the subject – the painter Francis Bacon – is positioned to the extreme left, his gaze brutally cut short by the edge of the frame. Add a horizon line that cuts right through the subject’s head and you’ve got an altogether uncomfortable composition, riddled with tension and anxiety.

Tension and anxiety. Actually, that sounds a lot like Bacon’s paintings. On second ...