Aaron Siskind taught English in New York City public schools, but became attracted to documentary photography and joined the documentary-based Photo League in the early 1930s. By the late 1930s, Siskind grew more aware of the visual art world, and he visited art exhibitions, and met artists such as Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and later Franz Kline, with whom he became good friends. Siskind's work grew increasingly spare and abstract in the mid 1940s, and by 1950 he had completely departed from his earlier documentary style in order to focus on weathered walls, torn posters, bits of seaweed, and fragments of graffiti.