Giving

One tree for every photograph.

For every photograph I sell, I put a native tree in the ground in Guadalajara. Not a donation to somebody else's project. My own shovel, my own back, and the coordinates published.

45 trees in the ground 45 photographs sold, 45 trees planted.
Plus 1,500 holm oak acorns sown by hand, all of it in Guadalajara.

One print, one tree

Every fine-art print that leaves my hands puts one native tree in the ground.

One collaboration, ten trees

Every brand partnership I close plants ten, wherever in the world the gear was used.

I spend most of the year sleeping outside in this country. I have paddled its coast, walked its interior and crossed the Almería desert with a camera, and Spain loses more land to fire every summer than anywhere else in Europe. It seemed wrong to keep taking pictures of a landscape and give nothing back to it.

So the rule is a count, not a percentage. One print sold, one tree. One collaboration closed, ten. The number at the top of this page only ever goes up, and you never have to take my word for a figure I have not shown you.

So far that is forty five photographs sold and forty five trees standing in Guadalajara, all of them put in by me. Alongside them are fifteen hundred holm oak acorns, sown by hand, a few of which will be oaks long after everyone reading this is gone.

I plant them myself

This is the part that matters to me. I do not pay an organisation to plant a tree with my name on it in a place I will never see. I buy the saplings, I load them in the car, I drive out, I dig the hole and I put them in. Sometimes a friend comes along. Nobody else does the digging.

It happens in the province of Guadalajara, in the highlands north east of Madrid: one of the emptiest corners of Europe, where the villages have been losing people for seventy years and the land shows it. The species are the ones that belong there and nothing else, grown from local seed: holm oak, Portuguese oak, Pyrenean oak, juniper, and the Spanish juniper that forms the largest forest of its kind on the continent a little further east.

Planting happens between November and March, because anything put in the ground in a Spanish summer is not planted, it is buried. Each tree gets a guard and gets watered through its first two summers, which is the difference between a tree and a photograph of a tree.

You will see them again

Every tree goes in with its coordinates recorded. That means these are specific trees in a specific valley, not a line in somebody's annual report, and it means I can walk back in with a camera and show you the same ones a few years older. That is the only kind of proof I find convincing, so it is the only kind I am willing to publish.

What this is not

It is not a percentage of profit, because that would mean publishing what I earn, and I would rather publish trees than accounts. It is not carbon offsetting, and I make no claim that any of this cancels out a flight or a season of driving. There is no foundation, no overhead and no annual report: there is a number on this page, a set of coordinates, and photographs.

Want to come and dig? I am serious. Write to me and I will tell you when the next planting is. tassilo@tassilodelatorre.com