Arctic Heroes

Photographer Ragnar Axelsson (*1958) hails from Island and has been documenting the Arctic (people, animals, landscapes) for more than forty years. The black and white photographs in this book were taken between 1986 and 2020 in Greenland; they give testimony to the extraordinary relationship between sledge dogs and hunters.

“Time and again, I visited small villages all over Greenland to collect stories of dogs and hunters. Sometimes I’d be lucky to get one story, other times none at all. I can safely say that it was just as difficult to squeeze stories out of these hunters as it was to photograph them out on the freezing cold of the sea ice.” People in cold climates are indeed given less to chatting than folks in warmer climates, I thought to myself and felt reminded of this Norwegian joke: Up in the cold north of the country, a traveller enters a bar where a lonely costumer is nursing his beer. After he had ordered a beer for himself, the traveller turned to the lonely customer and said: “Cheers!”, whereupon the other one said: “Wanna drink or wanna talk?”

The photographer’s encounters with the hunters weren’t always as anticipated and hoped for ... For the full review, go here