In the early 1940s, Siskind’s interests shifted away from socially conscious documentary photography toward more personal and creative pursuits. His discussions with fellow members of the Photo League made him realize “that a picture or a series of pictures must be informed with such things as order, rhythm, emphasis... —qualities which result from the perception and feeling of the photographer, and are not necessarily (or apparently) the property of the subject.” Compositions comprising found objects in Martha’s Vineyard and Gloucester, Massachusetts, enabled him to investigate new ideas and subject matter. Here he was influenced partly by Surrealism, the international artistic and literary movement that was preoccupied with themes of dreams, desire, the uncanny, the irrational, and the unconscious. Siskind’s image of boots and rope is a formal study of form and line as well as a mysterious evocation of the prone human body.