There are no "rules" so nothing to break. Nobody is going to take away your camera, levy a fine, or throw you in jail, regardless of how you compose a scene.

There are some suggestions or maybe guidelines, but these are perceptual principles dumbed down that produce OK results most of the time. The point of them is reduce bad pictures by bad photographers, not to make good pictures.

For example, when you are taking a head and shoulders shot of a person, you generally want to use vertical orientation and put the top of the head near the top of the picture. This is to counter the knee-jerk reaction of most inexperienced people, which is to point the camera at the nose and never even consider rotating it. That doesn't mean there can't be cases where that actually makes a good picture, but that most of the time it won't. So newbies are told do it this way. When they get enough experience hopefully they'll realize there is no such rule and use their own creative judgement each picture without using these so-called rules as crutches.

Another common one you hear is the "rule" of thirds. That is trying to prevent you from putting a major dividing line, like the horizon, right in the middle of the picture. Put the horizon 1/3 of the way up if the sky is the point of the picture, or 2/3 of the way up if the ground is the point of the picture. Obviously, this isn't going to be optimal much of the time, but it's usually better than putting the horizon in the middle of the picture.

Here's an example, which happens to be the featured photo on the site right now:

The land is closer to the 1/5 mark than 1/3, and the largest shrub is dead center in the photograph. It's still nice, though.

Again, it doesn't mean that there aren't cases where putting the horizon in the middle won't result in a good photograph. But, by the time you're ready for that, you'll have gotten past these crutches and will evaluate the framing of the picture for that scene on its own merit anyway.