Ali Shokri’s The Passion of Trees gathers photographs made in the natural landscapes of Iran and Azerbaijan. Published by Troubador Publishing Ltd in 2017, the 120-page hardcover is rooted in the forests Shokri has known and loved since childhood. Its subject is therefore not nature at a comfortable distance, but a familiar environment observed through attachment and concern.

The book emerged from the photographer’s experience of severe forest decline. Expanding roads and dams, together with continued destruction of woodland, form the context in which these photographs are understood. Shokri regards every tree as the bearer of an individual history; its death is not merely the loss of scenery, but the abrupt ending of a living narrative. This conviction gives the work its distinctive emotional and ethical structure.

Rather than separating landscape photography from environmental argument, The Passion of Trees brings the two into direct relation. Beauty establishes what is at stake, while the evidence of damage turns contemplation toward responsibility. The photographs ask readers to reconsider how trees are seen—not as an anonymous natural resource or decorative background, but as singular presences vulnerable to human decisions. The book’s warning extends beyond particular forests to the accelerating pressures of climate change and the decline of plant and animal life.

For collectors, its interest lies in this sustained union of regional subject, personal memory and ecological address. The Iran–Azerbaijan setting gives the work geographic specificity, while Shokri’s conception of trees as lives with interrupted destinies distinguishes it from a general survey of landscape. In book form, the project can be read as both a photographic collection and a concentrated environmental statement: an account of affection sharpened by the recognition that the places photographed may not remain unchanged.