The Photographer's Eye: Graphic Guide

RECTILINEAR

Not a diagonal in sight here, and even the oval boxes are squared up and on parade. This is a Shaker pantry cupboard in Massachusetts, and the Shaker communities of the nineteenth century were highly ordered places, with simplicity and plainness a practiced virtue. Many man-made things, especially buildings, cupboards, boxes, and so on, are rectilinear—constructed of verticals and horizontals; so you could rightly say that there’s no great imagination involved in shooting them that way. It involves setting up the camera level, using a normal-to-long lens, and facing them exactly. But in this case, for a book on the Shakers, it was more a matter of treating the subject in its own spirit. The characteristic wooden wall rails and pegs, ...