The 1930s saw a concerted effort, on the part of the principal theorists of the surrealist movement, to develop a photomontage practice that would bend the medium’s already-established political implications to the will of the surrealist commitment to psychoanalysis. Composite photographs, within this program, became signifiers of disorientation, instability and play-as-rebellion – actualised by exploiting photography’s distinctively illusionistic spatial affordances, but in such a way that emphasised photographic fragmentation, maintaining the connection between psychoanalysis and wit described in Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). André Breton and Paul Éluard collaborated on the first experiment in this vein, a series of photomontage alterations of the final photograph in René Char’s book of poems, Le Tombeau des secrets (1930). Their project established composite photography within the movement as an ongoing form of resistance that fused rejection of authority with the poetic acknowledgment of unconscious desire, all cast within the inherently social structure of the joke.