MOST people who know the name Abbas Kiarostami know him as one of the finest living film-makers, not only in his native Iran but in the world. At the end of the 1980s Kiarostami won international recognition for his film Where is the Friend’s Home? More films picked up more sackloads of awards and then in 1997, when he won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for A Taste of Cherry, he became the new wunderkind of the medium.

Perhaps tiring of prizes too easily won, Kiarostami, aged 65, lives frugally in Tehran and spends hours walking with his dog and his still camera in the hills around the city. Ostensibly these walks are about scouting film locations, but over the past 25 years landscape photography has become his therapy.

A series of 30 of his staggeringly beautiful snowscapes can be seen at Zelda Cheatle Gallery. These images, particularly when hung together, impose an unusual degree of reflection, like a sudden stillness when everything stands on the edge of discovery. They are all vistas of white, unblemished snow populated by trees — saplings, tall grown trees or big old gnarled trunks — planted in lines or dotted by nature, or captured heroically alone and steadfast in the folds of the great white hills.

The short Kiarostami films that I know reveal complexities beneath a simple surface, but I was still surprised at the sparse beauty and modernity of his photographic work. In the West we tend to think of the Persian artistic heritage as being one of great richness: the minutely detailed and coloured miniatures, the jewelled vessels. But Kiarostami’s work is the antithesis of this. It holds the essence of stillness.

He has shot this series in black and white, his range of tones faithfully reflecting the way nature transforms itself in deepest winter from bright colour to a whole new rainbow of gradations between black and white. His prints glow with translucent greys, with sooty violets, with blue-blacks and blackish blues. And his framing and composition are, like a Japanese pen-and-ink scroll painter’s, masterful in their restraint: a hundred people might look at the same landscape through a viewfinder, but few would find the exquisite simplicity of Kiarostami’s aesthetic.

After 25 years he knows what he wants. He will find his position, frame and compose his view and then sit down to wait for precisely the right moment when the sunlight hits the tips of the branches or a puff of cloud drifts across to touch the shoulder of a hill.

Although he has never made a film with snow because of its unpredictable nature, Kiarostami the photographer revels in the way landscapes lose their details when covered with snow. Under this heavy, muffling blanket, they find a new beauty, their familiar contours taking on new volumes and forms, reappearing as modern sculptures.

“Photographing a landscape,” he says, “is for me an invitation to contemplate nature; a captivating scene at a particular and unrepeatable moment which you feel summoned to contemplate, even if you are not a photographer and don’t even own a camera. For many years I would escape from the city, and indeed feel much better. Observing has an almost magical effect on me.”

Kiarostami is a graduate of the painting department of Tehran University and he uses his camera like a brush, recording the beautiful vistas laid out before him, but also interpreting them, refining and sifting what he sees. He finds stillness, calm, even hope in the tiny shoots pushing bravely through the snow and in the fine lacework of tree shadows, projected on to the snow like perfect transparencies.

These photographs are magnificently understated. Some consist of no more than a few branches against an expanse of white snow, others are just shadows. They are about nothing, but at the same time they are about everything, about looking and contemplating. Kiarostami is immersed in a spiritual awareness of what the physical world means.

And the act of photography is for him an act of sharing. “Not being able to feel the pleasure of seeing a magnificent landscape with someone else is a form of torture. That is why I started taking photographs. I wanted to somehow eternalise those moments of passion and pain.”

There is a measure of worship in these words. Perhaps, like Ansel Adams, whose landscape photography he admires more than any other, he is transforming landscapes into something close to a religious experience.

• Abbas Kiarostami: Trees in Snow is at Zelda Cheatle, Rivington Street, EC2 (020-7729 2422), until May 19