In his biography, Steichen describes how a new approach to photography helped him out of a “state of depression” after serving in the First World War. The experience with aerial photography during the war led to an increased “technical interest in photography, completely different from the pictorial interest I had as a boy in Milwaukee and as a young man in Photo-Secession days.” He studied the geometry of objects with his camera and was aiming to capture the true volume, weight, depth, and contour of the objects he photographed. 

The photograph is part of a series of abstracting experiments Steichen conducted in the early 1920s.