All images by Mason Resnik
“I’VE SEEN THIS PICTURE BEFORE.”
It may be cliché to say that rules are made to be broken, but it can be argued that the genre of street photography is the photographic discipline where breaking the rules will most likely allow you to see—and capture—more interesting photographs.
Traditional compositional rules come out of pre-photographic art forms. Leading lines, the rule of thirds, centered subjects and so on were developed over centuries by painters, and others using two-dimensional forms in order to organize the content of their images and create a common visual language.
Visual artists—painters, photographers, cinematographers and the like—are taught these rules and mostly conform to them.
