Ali Shokri, born in Tabriz, Iran, in 1982, is an Iranian landscape and nature photographer whose work centers on trees, the natural environment, and humanity’s relationship with the landscape. Active as a professional photographer since around 2004, Shokri has spent much of his career returning to one deceptively simple subject: the tree.

His photographs move beyond the conventional celebration of spectacular scenery. For Shokri, a tree is not merely an element within a landscape but an individual presence—something that grows, ages, suffers, and can ultimately disappear. Years of observing forests in Iran and Azerbaijan, together with the effects of deforestation, road construction, dams, and development, gradually transformed his photography into a deeply personal form of environmental witnessing.

This idea lies at the heart of his long-term project The Passion of Trees. In many of these photographs, trees appear isolated, silent, and almost sculptural. Through restrained compositions, strong tonal relationships, and close attention to trunks, branches, textures, and surrounding space, Shokri turns the tree from a background element of landscape photography into a portrait subject in its own right.

There is often a quiet melancholy in these images. They speak simultaneously of endurance and vulnerability. Shokri has described each tree as having a story comparable to that of a human being; when a tree dies, an entire story comes to an end. This almost humanistic way of seeing trees is central to his photography. Rather than simply documenting their physical beauty, he asks the viewer to recognize them as living presences.

After more than a decade of sustained work, the project developed into the photobook The Passion of Trees, published in the United Kingdom by Matador in 2017. Featuring photographs made largely in Iran and Azerbaijan, the book brings together Shokri’s long observation of trees, forests, and environmental change. It functions both as a photographic study of the natural world and as a quiet appeal for greater environmental awareness.

Shokri’s work demonstrates how landscape photography can move beyond the depiction of beautiful places. Through prolonged attention to a single subject, landscape becomes a way of speaking about time, memory, loss, resilience, and our responsibility toward the natural world. In The Passion of Trees, the tree is therefore both subject and symbol—a living presence through which Shokri asks us to reconsider how we see, and how we treat, the environment around us.