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Ali Shokri
I am an Iranian landscape photographer and environmentalist. I have been active as a passionate nature photographer since 2004, focusing on trees. Known for portraying the Trees Photography, I was TED speaker in Baku in 2010 and published a book about the life of trees in the UK in 2017.
Tim Parkin
Amateur Photographer who plays with big cameras and film when in between digital photographs.
My introduction to Iran as a location for photography and also as a country with a wealth of great photographers was whilst judging the environmental Photographer of the Year competition. I was surprised at the number of entries from Iran until they pointed out that Iranians were not generally able to enter many competitions because of having to pay in Western currency. The EPOTY competition was free to enter, and because of this, many photography schools submitted work and it showed a fascinatingly varied and beautiful landscape.
Since then I've seen a few great Iranian photographers whilst browsing online but Ali Shokri stood out as one that I was determined to include in On Landscape. Fortunately, he responded to our emails and obliged us with some interesting answers and great photographs. I hope you enjoy his work as much as I have. I highly recommend a look around his website if you have time after reading this.
Can you tell me a little about your education, childhood passions, early exposure to photography and vocation?
Since childhood, my passions were climbing trees and walks beside rivers with my friends. I was so curious and excited and wanted to experience everything. When my family and I went to my father's ancestral gardens I really wanted to capture those beauties of nature and wanted to show them to my friends and my family. I believed the camera is the best media to share my ideas. My job is to photograph nature, besides it, I have an art gallery in Tabriz city, but my main job is nature photography especially trees.
Tell me about why you love landscape photography? A little background on what your first passions were, what you studied and what job you ended up doing.
I studied Computer Network Engineering, but during my education, I knew I wouldn’t like to be an employed person. I wanted to have a job to connect directly with nature. So when I graduated, I went into art and continued with photography.