The True Photographic History of “The Rule of Thirds” (and Golden Mean)
It’s neither as old nor as important as you think
by M.H. Rubin, with research by Dr. Gina Talley
This is a photograph that was on the wall of my house when I was little— it’s Jerry Uelsmann’s Self-Portrait as Robinson & Rejlander (1964). I always wondered who those guys were. I was about to find out.
I grew up in a home filled with photography and hundreds of photo books of all kinds; I’d enjoyed learning from dozens of photographers and I’d been taking pictures since I was a kid in the 1970s — and yet I never heard the expression “rule of thirds” nor seen all the lines and grids in photography until well after college, probably not until the 1990s. And it didn’t fit with anything I understood about taking pictures. So how was that possible for me to have missed such an important, popular, and apparently ancient set of ideas? I spent some time trying to figure that out.
Working with a history professor from Villanova University, Dr. Gina Talley, we spent many months researching where this idea came from, how it evolved, and how and when it was used in education. The full research and exhaustive bibliography can be found here: www.neomodern.com/rot
