Ragnar Axelsson’s thawing vision of Arctic life

For pho­tog­ra­ph­er Rag­nar Axels­son, jump­ing from ice­berg to ice­berg and bear­ing frigid air is the easy part. It’s cap­tur­ing the untold sto­ries of hunt­ing com­mu­ni­ties in remote land­scapes that is the real under­tak­ing. ​“You start think­ing dif­fer­ent­ly about the world when you see how hard oth­er peo­ple have it,” he says. ​“I pho­to­graph these places because I need to show how tough it real­ly is.”

Axels­son is one of the small hand­ful of pho­tog­ra­phers trav­el­ling to the Arc­tic and doc­u­ment­ing its cli­mate. As a young pho­to­jour­nal­ist in Ice­land, he left his news­pa­per to trav­el to Africa after see­ing its coun­tries face eco­nom­ic strug­gle and war on the news. ​“When you’re young, you want to go and do some­thing inter­est­ing,” says Axels­son. ​“I saw there were prob­lems in Africa so I decid­ed to go there and take pho­tos. But once I was there, I realised that every pho­tog­ra­ph­er in the world was there tak­ing the same pictures.”

He turned his atten­tion to the Arc­tic. When he was younger, he had learnt how to fly in hopes of becom­ing a pilot. He began fly­ing to the neigh­bour­ing coun­try of Green­land to col­lect hours for his license. Even then, dur­ing one of his trips in the win­ter of 1980, he rev­elled in the icy cli­mate before think­ing ​“this is going to change dras­ti­cal­ly in the com­ing years”.

His first jour­ney to Green­land with his cam­era was in 1986, the first of four decades of Arc­tic pho­tog­ra­phy now com­piled into Axelsson’s exhi­bi­tion, At the Edge of the World, on dis­play at The Pho­tog­ra­phers Gallery in Lon­don until Jan­u­ary 26. A firm believ­er that the Arctic’s cli­mate will be a press­ing issue in the com­ing years, he says his art is to show peo­ple ​“how life there real­ly is”.

“It’s not easy to pho­to­graph the Arc­tic,” he says. ​“You are pho­tograph­ing in the cold­est of con­di­tions, and you have to try to get that cold­ness into the photo.”

The series con­veys the effects of cli­mate change on remote lands and their inhab­i­tants. Its black-and-white pho­tographs are harsh, bar­ren and yearn­ing – del­i­cate­ly reveal­ing a region in tran­si­tion. From a man stand­ing on sea ice in 1980s Green­land to a child in Siberia near a camp­ground in 2016, his images give an inti­mate look into the Arctic’s past, present, and uncer­tain future.

Axels­son recounts a time when he had first begun doc­u­ment­ing and speak­ing to the com­mu­ni­ties, and he passed by an elder­ly man in Qaanaaq, Green­land. With the help of Axelsson’s trans­la­tor, the man explained that some­thing was wrong and that their world was slow­ly changing.

“These peo­ple are a part of nature and so they sense things in a dif­fer­ent way from most oth­er peo­ple,” he says. ​“My focus from the very begin­ning was to doc­u­ment this change, and I knew it would be a long-term project.”

Accord­ing to POLITI­CO, Greenland’s ice sheets are los­ing 270 bil­lion tonnes of water per year, as the cli­mate cri­sis inten­si­fies. 2024 saw the hottest year ever on record across the world, pass­ing the 1.5C thresh­old set by the Paris agree­ment for the first time, while some pro­jec­tions pre­dict that there will be zero ice left in the polar sea as soon as 2030.

Mean­while, the Pres­i­dent elect of the USA, Don­ald Trump, has announced a desire to take over Green­land – refus­ing to rule out using mil­i­tary or eco­nom­ic force to do so – with some reports sug­gest­ing that he is look­ing to take advan­tage of the area’s believed nat­ur­al resources and strate­gic trad­ing route geog­ra­phy once the ice has melted.

While Den­mark has dis­missed Trump’s request to pur­chase the island, one thing is for cer­tain – change is com­ing to the Arc­tic cir­cle. Axels­son notes that he saw changes him­self through­out the decades, most strik­ing­ly in a decline in tra­di­tion­al Inu­it cloth­ing. When he met the elder­ly man in Qaanaaq, he was wear­ing inu­it cloth­ing just as his ances­tors wore over 150 years ago – a sur­vival tac­tic to keep warm in such a cold cli­mate. But today, on the east coast of Green­land, Axels­son says it’s rare to see that much fur clothing.

“You can’t get those same pic­tures as you did years before, because the cli­mate is chang­ing how these peo­ple are dress­ing and doing things,” he explains.

Yet despite these changes, there were con­stants. Axels­son fol­lowed many of his sub­jects for over 35 years, with some becom­ing life-long friends. He says the Arc­tic com­mu­ni­ties still show great fond­ness for their home.

“The peo­ple who live in the Arc­tic real­ly love it and want to be there,” he says. ​“Of course they have tele­vi­sions and have seen movies show­ing a dif­fer­ent world, and they want to trav­el and see those places. But they also always want to come back. This is their home.

“For that, I try to catch those moments in their life and in their envi­ron­ment because I know the moment is nev­er com­ing back.”

At the Edge of the World by Rag­nar Axels­son is on view at The Pho­tog­ra­phers’ Gallery until Jan­u­ary 26.

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