Ragnar Axelsson

Raised on an isolated farm in southern Iceland, Ragnar Axelsson (born 1958) became captivated early on by the brutal beauty of the North Atlantic and the delicate interactions between its inhabitants and their environment. Born of that fascination, Faces of the North, first published in a small print run in 2004, established Axelsson as one of the leading documentary photographers of our time. It contained about 100 lushly austere, powerful images of Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands, taken over two decades. Long out of print, Faces of the North is now republished in a special anniversary edition that echoes the format of Axelsson's latest publications, Last Days of the Arctic and Behind the Mountains. Containing the original selection of photographs documenting the vanishing lifestyles of the North Atlantic, the new edition also includes previously unpublished photos, Axelsson's personal accounts of the journeys which led to the images' creation and the artist's sketches of the photographs, drawn nightly as he traveled through the Arctic. In the 2004 edition of Faces of the North, Axelsson collected the images of farmers, hunters and fishermen in the Arctic and the Atlantic that he became best known for; in the 2014 edition, his oeuvre comes full circle, as he looks back upon the foundation of his photographic passion and career.

The Arctic is warming faster than any other region on earth. This rapid climate change has had a devastating effect on the region’s ecology and, consequently, on the Inuit peoples who depend on the Arctic ice for their livelihood and culture. Hailed as one of the greatest documentary photographers of our times, Ragnar Axelsson has been recording the changing face of life in the Arctic for some 30 years. This second edition of The Last Days of the Arctic (which was first published in 2010 and quickly became a rarity) presents 160 of his stunning photographs from Canada and Greenland, with superb duotone printing, captions added for the black-and-white photographs and new images. Axelsson’s gorgeous photographs show vast glaciers, sleds gliding across ice and houses buried in snow, but they also depict how the Inuit’s changing way of life prefigures the changes that are on their way to the rest of the world.
Ragnar Axelsson was born in Iceland in 1958. He has been a staff photographer for Morgunbla, Iceland’s largest newspaper, since 1976. He has been traveling to the Arctic for almost three decades, and his photographs of the continent have won him worldwide recognition, with photographs and picture essays published in Life, National Geographic, Time and elsewhere. The first edition of Last Days of the Arctic, published in 2010, won critical acclaim, with photo features in The New York Times. Nominated Book of the Year in the (London) Times, it was described as “a gift for the eyes, mind and heart.” Axelsson’s documentary of the same name was aired on PBS (in the station’s Global Voices series) in 2012, also to great acclaim.

Every autumn, Icelandic farmers travel into the country’s interior to collect their sheep from the summer pastures. This process has remained unchanged for centuries and the search is still conducted primarily by horse or on foot. For the past 25 years, Icelandic photographer Axelsson (born 1958) has observed farmers on their roundups in one of the most difficult but also magnificent grazing terrains of the Icelandic wilderness. Axelsson has been a staff photographer for Iceland’s largest newspaper since 1976, and his stunning iconic images of the Arctic have earned him a worldwide reputation as a skilled documentary photographer. The photographs in Behind the Mountains, of sheep roundups in ravines and mountain hills, in wild snowstorms and rain, near glaciers and across rugged lava, paint a realistic and compelling picture of traditional farming and its interaction with the harsh landscape.

Ragnar Axelsson is one of Iceland's best-known photojournalists. For over 15 years, he has been documenting people in the North Atlantic. In this book of nearly 200 photographs, Axelsson turns his lens on the Arctic, which is warming faster than any other region on earth. Axelsson's gorgeous photographs, mostly in black and white, show vast glaciers, sleds gliding across ice, and houses mostly buried in snow, but they also depict how the Inuit's way of life is transforming drastically as a result of climate change, prefiguring the enormous changes that are on their way to the rest of the world.