Aleksander Sliussarev is called a photographer of shadows, highlights and reflections. For a photographer they play a more important role than the surfaces of things. According to Sliussarev, it’s quite natural, because an object is multiform: it has as many aspects as you will want to see in it. In particular, the shadow and the highlight possess the same original visual meaning as the object itself. Sliussarev asserts that the most meaningful subject appearing in his pictures is the city environment.

He invented the concept of a «flat landscape». First he named so a particular shot, although such type of image had already appeared in his earlier works: a landscape without a linear, diagonal perspective. In Sliussarev’s photos one can see an expansion of the still life genre. The object there, as well as in a still life, turns out a symbolic object. The difference, though, is in the fact that the meaning of this symbol remains obscure. This is not, however, the «forgotten» meaning of the old still life, nor the commercial meaning of the advertising still life, but it’s the meaning of the real life around us yet to be discovered.

Aleksander Rappaport writes: «The enigmatic attraction of these shots doesn’t lie only in their technical perfection — nuances and contrasts of black and white, elaboration of the subtlest textures, contrast of the linear acuteness and the softness of texture — but also in the specifics of the photographic rendering of time, which Sliussarev presents in a very complex and rare form: unity of the monumental and the momentary. Graphic situations and angles are often as momentary here as the exposure time — just a flash in the time flow. But compositions based on the well-balanced combination of horizontal and vertical lines are monumental as something eternal and permanent. The contrast of these time forms lends significance to the most ordinary fragments of our objective material world, the significance we’re not accustomed to. The author himself defines the photography he’s engaged in as analytical, which means that the information of a given moment is not important for him, while the information of the state of this given moment is what is important».