One current strand of contemporary photography is abstraction. Sasha Terebenin (Alexander Georgievich Terebenin) was a theatre designer, decorator, and artist and he is currently doing fine art research, photography and installations. A striking feature of his oeuvre is his minimalism and abstraction.

The emergence of digital photography means that a majority of people in the West own a camera and have take pictures. From family portraits to snapshots, many consider photography as a means of direct literal representation of people and things. Yet from its beginnings abstraction has been intrinsic to photography, and its persistent popularity reveals much about the medium.

Photography has always participated in such abstraction, whether its internal image-language is representational or abstract, documentary or pictorialist. On the other hand, abstraction in photography is often considered to be inconceivable and to be antithetical to its very essence, which is built upon the imprint of the trace of a real object on the photosensitive surface and the creation of a strong bond between photography and reality.