I don't see that it's particularly rule-breaking, to be honest. It's formally quite nice, not necessarily *strict* but nice. It follows a variant of the rule of thirds that you see quite a lot in successful images, in which one corner of the imaginary tic-tac-toe board stands alone as an image.
It's very "street" to my eye, a fortuitous confluence of elements at an instant of time, but with front-to-back depth of focus. It's a "street" photo that's shot like a landscape. Is that rule-breaking?
Does the grass come out mottled in the print? The linear features in the grass are utterly critical to this, leading the eye to the figure, but the mottled overall appearance I find unfortunate. There needs to be some texture there, but it feels a little much here. I wish the figure had more detail. I'm not 100 percent happy with the mass lower right either, for reasons I cannot put my finger on, and possibly just because that's where the overcookedness is most visible. Anyways, when you're shooting "street" you gotta take what you've got, right?
Rule-breaking isn't just a question of "you have to know you're doing it" it's a question of doing so with care. If you're going to break one rule, you should follow others, comfort and guide the viewer, give the viewer some solid grounding in tropes they know and feel good about, and then give them the one broken rule. Then, break it for a reason: to emphasize a point, to create a feeling, to evoke.
Well done, as usual, Russ.
Andrew