Adobe Stock: Breaking the Rules of Composition

AoiroStudio
Jul 25, 2017

Each month, our friends over Adobe Stock will explore through their photo database what creators have been up to making. For this month’s theme, they are looking at how creators have been making things that aren’t coming from the ordinary. Deliberately breaking the rules of composition to shock or unsettle us, confronting the hard things. Let’s take a look.

In Adobe’s Words

This month we’re exploring how artists use angles, balance, and perspective – but we’re not talking about how to do any of these things the “right” way. Instead, we’re looking at how artists deliberately break the rules of composition to shock or unsettle us. Whether they’re communicating about social change, political upheaval, or environmental threats, we’re examining the rebel-artist mind as it throws us off balance and nudges us to confront hard things. To start, we got some expert advice on flouting convention.

It might sound counterintuitive, but if you want to break the rules well, Morgan David de Lossy, photographer, film director, and senior product manager at Adobe, says there are some rules. You can’t simply start by disrupting the standards – to take the rules apart, first you have to figure them out: “It’s like most things in life,” says Morgan. “You must start by mastering the balance. Learn from the classics and feel comfortable with them. Only then can a photographer play with unbalanced composition on purpose.”

Rebel artists bring a different perspective to the table, unsettle us, whether they’re communicating about social change, political upheaval or environmental threats.