When I look at photographic work I admire by people who are accounted (or account themselves) as artists rather than documentarians, I’m often struck at how they seem to avoid the compositions that the rest of us strive for—and yet how conscious and strategic their avoidance can be. The average amateur like me works for compositions that appear ‘natural’ or rule-abiding—objects whole inside the frame, landscapes with deliberate foreground interest and avoiding an arbitrary cutting-off of a feature at the edges, a horizontal dividing line of the horizon either down low or up high so the picture doesn’t split completely in the middle. Human beings as faces, eyes in the top third; bodies at 3/4, never just cut off the feet. Rule of thirds, golden ratios, leading lines.
Every once in a while, I’ve seen something that doesn’t fit the rules as I understand them where I’m determined to work the shot anyway. I couldn’t easily explain why. In this case, I suppose it was the starkness of the morning summer light on a hot day, the difference in the window reflections, the stark vertical and horizonal lines, the broken and faded signs. It just worked for me.
A lot of street shots feel like that to me. I throw most of them out, but a few that I save grab me because they feel like glimpses and fragments rather than beautifully isolated subjects.
Or sometimes it’s a shot that’s just plain bungled in some technical sense but there’s just something there, at least for me—and whatever that is makes me think that it might not have been better if it had been crisply focused or properly framed.