Formalism in photography emphasizes elements such as line, colour, shape, texture, and other aspects rather than the subject matter.

The seven basic elements to photographic art and formalism are:

Line – A geometric element that is made up of a moving point which extends along the path of the point.

Lines can be curved, straight or a combination of the two. Lines can be vertical or horizontal or somewhere in between. They can also be solid, dashed, interrupted, implied or psychological.

Shape – The visible characteristics which makeup a particular spatial form.

Shapes are two-dimensional and can be measured by height and width. Shapes can be the outline of an either familiar or an unfamiliar object.

Form – The shape and structure of something as distinguished from its material.

Form can be geometric (regular) and organic. Form is three-dimensional and has an overall height, width and depth.

Texture – The visual or tactile surface characteristics and how something appears and looks.

Texture is able to be smooth or rough, but there are other commonly used descriptions also used such as; soft, slimy, wet, hard, shiny, bumpy, etc. These are often presented in two dimensions, like in photographs.

Colour – A phenomenon of light or a visual perception which allows us to view the appearance of objects and light sources and be able to differentiate otherwise identical objects.

The three properties of colour are hue (description of a colour, e.g. blue, red, etc.), value (brightness or darkness) and saturation (intensity/purity of a colour). Light itself has no perceived colour.

Size – The relative extent of something, the overall dimensions or magnitude of it.

In a photograph, size is relative and can be an illusion. When an unfamiliar object is in the scene, it could be difficult to get an understanding of its size, however, familiar objects in the scene help us determine the scale shown in the photograph.

Depth – The direct linear measurement from front to back.

Most images have a foreground, middle ground, and background. Even a casual photo has a sense of depth due to visual cues. A stronger sense of depth in an image is when the delineation between those “grounds” is stronger.