Squares vs. Rectangles in Photography

My photographic archive, viewed from a certain altitude, resembles nothing more than a collection of rectangles and squares. The rectangles come from my 35mm cameras, while the squares owe their existence to my twin lens reflexes, arguably my most often-used bit of kit. Many readers of this blog may recall that I made a New Year’s resolution to use only the Rolleiflex 2.8F for 2025; I stuck with my pledge for about three months, but as the seasons changed I once again added my 35mm cameras back to the rotation.

My one-camera pledge was probably doomed from the start, yet this thought experiment led to some interesting questions which continue to percolate. One such question involves the shape of the photos I make, and how the dimensions of the negatives of a particular camera influence my workflow and the success or failure of the photos that result from them. It might be a stretch to say that I broke my 2025 New Years Resolution solely because I grew tired of making square photos, yet this variable—which I’d not given much thought to previously—was, I would wager, probably at the very least a contributing factor in that choice.

The photo that brought all of this to mind for me recently is one of the “outtakes” from my visit with Scott Ferguson to Coney Island on New Year’s Day, 2026.

Though properly exposed, this backlit, monochrome image has little to recommend it. Not only does it say next to nothing about the distant figures in the water—we could be anywhere, in any season, with any random group of people—its composition is generic and, dare I say it, rather boring. A photo editor would be more than justified in cropping out the acres of sky, as they add nothing to the image, and in fact probably subtract from it by forcing a symmetry that deprives the photo of dynamism.

The frame from the same roll I included in my post, in contrast, while perhaps a bit less pleasing to the eye, makes better use of the Rolleiflex’s square format and is also more successful in telling a story about that day.

While the Rolleiflex, a storied portrait camera, draws the photographer almost involuntarily toward tight framing of subjects in the viewfinder’s bullseye (a formula many of my photos from the Plunge followed), this photo succeeds by playing against that expectation. The center of the frame here is almost entirely vacant. The photo’s chief human subject, the runner, is kinetic; he splashes down and to the right of the frame, partially escaping from view before the shutter catches him. His diagonal movement away from waves and seagull and people and camera not only enlivens the photo and earns its square format, but for me makes it a bit more effective in documenting the day’s events: this Polar Bear is eager, as we might also be, to get the hell out of the freezing water on a frigid New Year’s Day.

Even within the realm of portraiture for which it is often used, the square-format Rolleiflex in my mind rewards compositions that resist its pull toward tight central grouping. (Though as Richard Avedon demonstrated, with the right subject a balanced negative can turn out just fine). Unlike a standard 35mm photo, whose orientation—portrait or landscape—supplies viewers with a visual floor upon which to anchor their perceptions, the 6×6 square frame is mum on such questions. Received wisdom among photographers states that rectangular photos align with the natural way that humans perceive the world, while square images, in their failure to pick a dominant side, feel a bit alien to our perceptual apparatus, and can read as alternatively formal, distant or cerebral.  

The following Rolleiflex photos, each fairly formal in composition, nonetheless contain elements that depart from the central axis, adding a bit of tension and (one hopes) engaging the viewer’s attention.

For all of the merits of the Rolleiflex and of 6×6 negatives in general, there are moments when I tire of the strictures of square photographs, when in fact I yearn for the immediacy and perhaps messiness that in my mind can only come from a rectangular setup. In choosing to orient my 35mm camera horizontally or vertically in the heat of the moment, I am in fact already interpreting the scene before me, in the process moving a step closer to the action in a way that the Rolleiflex, with its square frame’s formality and stillness, does not, in my hands at least, so easily permit.

I’ll conclude this post by referring to a famous image from the history of photography, Alfred Eisenstadt’s 1945  “VJ Day in Times Square.”

As many readers may know, Eisenstadt was not the only photojournalist on hand in Times Square on August 14, 1945, the day of the Allied victory over Japan in World War II. A U.S. Navy photographer, Victor Jorgensen, caught the same scene from the waist level (very likely using a Rolleiflex) at almost the exact instant that Eisenstadt clicked his shutter.

Looking at the two images side by side, one can readily see the advantages of each different camera orientation. With his square-format camera, Jorgensen, closer to his subjects, fastens his gaze on the pair in the center of his frame. While his photo also makes room for the reactions of a number of pedestrians in the background, his frame, like a similar but far better known Rolleiflex photograph from Robert Doisneau from five years later, could clearly be read as a private romantic moment, devoid of larger context. Notwithstanding this slight limitation, the New York Times used Jorgenson’s excellent photo in its coverage. 

In choosing a vertical orientation to capture the couple’s full bodies and faces while aligning them with the crowded vista of Times Square just behind, in contrast, Eisenstadt uses his Leica to place that swooning kiss at the center of a public event at the core of a metropolis that had until then long been at a state of war—its rectangular frame and slightly wider perspective better matching the enormity of the occasion. From that recognizable urban intersection, his iconic photo made it into Life magazine, and from there into history.

Postscript: On Digital Squares and Rectangles

As I was writing this piece, I found myself wondering how and indeed if it applies to digital photography. While digital photographers can, like us “filmies,” crop any image into whatever shape pleases them in post, as far as I know there has never been a camera with a dedicated square-format sensor on the digital market. When one uses a vintage film camera such as a Rolleiflex, Hasselblad or any of the high-quality Japanese equivalents, in contrast, one apprehends the world through a square window. This not only cuts against normative expectations—the natural human bias toward rectangles that I have alluded to earlier—but has practical implications for the images as they move downstream toward eventual printing. While I have heard from my husband’s family in India that square photographs were the norm in analog weddding photography there up until the late 1970s, no darkroom I have ever seen gives that shape such preferential treatment. Darkroom easels, developing trays and—most consequentially—photographic paper come in a variety of sizes, but always in rectangular shapes. Though my enlarger is equipped with negative carriers that make it easy to print square images (like Diane Arbus, I have filed down the edges of one set of carriers to artfully expose the black border of the frame), the rectangular bias in the rest of the darkroom persists, and has real-world implications. If I want to make a full-sized enlargement of a square image, say 18×18 inches, for example (a size I almost never attempt), I must use a very large 20×24 sheet of photographic paper, single examples of which can cost up to $20, and waste a good portion of it in the bargain. And as anyone who has spent time in a darkroom can attest, one sheet, even for a straightforward negative in the hands of an experienced printer, is seldom adequate to get the job done.

Thanks for reading.

FEATURED IMAGE: Alwyn Court Cornice, NYC, 2025. Rolleiflex 2.8F, Kodak Portra 400

You can see more of my photos at www.leica1933.com.

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