Most devastating daring photos by Ragnar Axelsson
Where the World is Melting images of Ragnar Axelsson
Polar Bear on the Sea Ice, Greenland 2019 © Ragnar Axelsson
Ragnar Axelsson photos of the Arctic
For over forty years, Ragnar Axelsson has been photographing the people, animals, and landscape of the most remote regions of the Arctic, including Iceland, Siberia, and Greenland.
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In stark black-and-white images, he captures the elemental, human experience of nature at the edge of the liveable world, making visible the extraordinary relationships between the people of the Arctic and their extreme environment — relationships now being altered in profound and complex ways by unprecedented climate changes.
Kötlujökull Melting, Iceland, 2021, © Ragnar Axelsson
A photojournalist at Morgunblaoio from 1976 to 2020, Ragnar has also worked freelance assignments in Latvia, Lithuania, Mozambique, South Africa, China, and Ukraine.
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His photographs have been featured in LIFE, Newsweek, Stern, GEO, National Geographic, Time, and Polka and have been exhibited widely.
The Ragnar Axelsson: Where the World is Melting exhibition in Hamburg, German offers a personal look at Axelsson’s life’s work to date.
Sermiliqaq, Greenland, 1997 © Ragnar Axelsson
Behind his photographs there lies the firm conviction that the traditional culture of the Arctic population is not only in the process of vanishing, but it is unable to withstand the destructive effects of such major forces as the economy and climate change.
Axelsson’s information comes first-hand from the people on the ground. He goes to great lengths to visit and spend time with them.
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For this reason, and because he experiences their often-arduous way of life, he gains their trust.
That, in turn, allows him to freeze moments in photographs of their lives and write up their narratives.
Grandeur of Nordic nature
In doing so, he becomes an ambassador to their existence and their changing circumstances.
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The other major topic that thrills Axelsson is the force of the elements and the grandeur of Nordic nature.
Horse Rescue, Skarðsheiði, Iceland, 1995 © Ragnar Axelsson
His impressive landscape photography is testimony to this.
With the gaze of the researcher and artist, he analyses even the smallest natural structures, which are reminiscent of modern drawings by the likes of Paul Klee or Per Kirkeby.
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As he does this, he holds consistently to his aesthetic decision in favour of black and white photography.
However, Axelsson’s commitment extends far beyond exclusively working as a photographer and journalist.
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Several photographers, including Magnum photographer Paolo Pellegrin, have asked him to support them during their projects on climate change.
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Axelsson, who is an experienced pilot, also flew over the glaciers in Iceland with Olafur Eliasson, when the latter was working on his glacier-based art project.
Mikide Kristiansen, Thule, Greenland, 1999 © Ragnar Axelsson
Moreover, he accompanied the climate researchers Stefan Rahmstorf and Michael Mann when these men wanted to see the melting glaciers. Axelsson is a good friend of the vulcanologist Haraldur Sigurdsson.
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Together, they have journeyed to remote places in Indonesia and Greenland, where they investigated the blue lakes on the melting Greenland glacier, among other phenomena.
Sled Dog, Thule, Greenland, 2019 © Ragnar Axelsson
Ragnar Axelsson remembers Iceland 1968: One of my greatest memories as a seven-year-old boy was seeing a glacier for the first time.
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I was on my way to the countryside under the Oræfajokull volcano and saw the glacier out the window of a Douglas DC-3 airliner.
Myrdalsjokull, Iceland, 2010 © Ragnar Axelsson
The plane flew low, the glaciers glowed in the spring sun and the cracks were staggering. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.
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That was the beginning of an adventure that still hasn’t come to an end. This was my first summer of the next eight years in the countryside.
Arctic Hunter on the Sea Ice, Ingelfieldfjord, Greenland, 2019 © Ragnar Axelsson
The district was remote and isolated. There were no bridges over the glacial rivers, and nothing got across them except for flying birds, specially equipped trucks, or brave riders on Icelandic horses.
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It was a big event every time a plane landed on the Fagurhlsmyri airfield. I peered out the window of the plane as we were landing.
Local farmers were standing by an old Willys jeep. They waited for the people, goods and mail that came to this rural district once a week.
Mads Ole Hunter, Thule, Greenland, 2019 © Ragnar Axelsson
Young, impressionable minds could be seized by anxiety. It was like entering another world. I was welcomed by my cousin, the farmer Sigurour Bjornsson from Kvísker, who was one of the seven siblings who lived on the farm.
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My anxiety dissipated in the wind as we sped off in the old Russian jeep and drove over the unbridged rivers. Dogs leapt out of hiding and barked at the jeep on the way home, trying to bite the tyres.
One of my memories of a truly tough guy was when the farmer, Sigurour, reached for a signal revolver, wound down the jeep window and fired into the air. The dogs scattered, howling. He grinned; they all fled when the gun was pointed at them.
Edge of the liveable world
I was sitting with a Leica camera in my arms that my dad had lent me. I was tirelessly interested in taking pictures. It took a lot of trust to lend a child a camera that was as expensive as a car.
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I wasn’t allowed to disappoint him. I had promised him to take good care of the camera. He had given me art books about famous painters and foreign magazines, LIFE and Stern.
Melting Iceberg, Scoresbysund, Greenland, 2014 © Ragnar Axelsson
They contained the coolest pictures I’d ever seen. “You have to take pictures and apply yourself,” was the message I got from Dad.
Those photographs were etched in my mind, no less than the paintings. But I couldn’t paint, so I had to take pictures.
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Growing up in the countryside with self-educated people who did scientific work along with their farm chores made an invaluable contribution to the course of my life.
Hunter Kangertittivaq on the Sea Ice, Greenland, 1995 © Ragnar Axelsson
It gave me such a huge amount of knowledge in so many areas. Every weekend, I went hiking up the mountains and studied the glaciers, birds, geology, botany, bugs and butterflies.
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I sometimes rode bareback on my white horse all alone over a gushing glacial river where we started to float and sometimes had difficulties getting across to measure the depth of the next glacial river beyond the bridge on Fjallsa. That was the life!
Farmer Guðjón Þorsteinsson, Myrdal, Iceland, 1995 © Ragnar Axelsson
The glacial lakes are always changing, and the glaciers are receding. They have both been bigger and smaller in the past centuries than they are now.
I was like a fly on the wall taking pictures of the people on the farm and life in the countryside. The camera was always hanging around my neck.
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Seal hunting was a major source of income for the farmers at that time; they sold the skins for coats. It was an adventure to be able to take pictures of the hunting and to wade into the icy glacial lakes with nets and cast them in front of the estuary.
Myrdalssandur, Iceland, 1996 © Ragnar Axelsson
The river was full of sand, and it could be dangerous, but I felt like an adult even though I was only ten years old when I was first allowed into the rivers.
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Everything that happened in the countryside toughened me up and prepared me for what I was going to do later in life — to photograph a life that was changing and to record time that would never come back in pictures.
I immediately became aware of the importance of documenting time and freezing moments of life; I saw everything in pictures and still do. I promised the brothers at Kvisker not to flaunt the pictures of the seal hunts until they were gone.
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I didn’t print those pictures from the hunt until many years later. When I look back, I think they stand the test of time. If you travel to where the pictures were taken over fifty years ago, you can clearly see that the tail of the glacier is in a completely different place today.
Myrdalsjokull, Iceland, 2010 © Ragnar Axelsson
It has never been more important than it is now to document in words and images the lives of the people who are experiencing great changes in the Arctic so that the whole world can see what is happening.
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A photograph is only a small piece in the jigsaw that makes up the big picture, but sometimes it is these small pieces that open our eyes to the broader reality.
Sandey, Faroe Islands, 1989 © Ragnar Axelsson
I hope the exhibition will give a little glimpse of life in the Arctic. May we never stop documenting life on earth and freezing moments in time.
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Photographs have opened people’s eyes before and changed things – they will continue to do so, as long as the world keeps turning.
Text Ragnar Axelsson & Isabel Siben / Photos Ragnar Axelsson
