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The History of "The Rule of Thirds"

“The Rule of Thirds” It’s neither as old nor as important as you think by M. H.

For the pictorialists, one didn’t just push the button; it usually took additional work to transform a snap into “art-photography.” To accomplish this they employed a variety of techniques: softening sharpness, using special papers and emulsions, hand-coloring prints, and combining negatives to create montages (the reason Uelsmann honored them in his “self portrait”). Distinguished poet and art critic Sadakichi Hartmann, a sometime contributor to Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work, wrote his own pictorialist textbook on these topics in 1910, and presented the same rule but in a different way, suggesting students place the point of interest “never exactly in the center or very near to it” and “somewhere near the lower corners of the dotted square [in Diag 16]”: Common sense “rules of thumb” — a body of conventional tips — soon arose, including such advice as “Keep the horizon line straight” and “Avoid placing background objects so they seem to be growing out of the subject’s head.” Also from the beginning, attempts were made to work out methods of composition based on aesthetic theory.

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