Ragnar Axelsson’s thawing vision of Arctic life

At the Edge of the World — For over four decades, the Icelandic photographer has been journeying to the tip of the earth and documenting its communities. A new exhibition dives into his archive.

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”.

Top to bottom:Left to right: Scoresbysund, Greenland, 2019 Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery Hele-Bobb in Northern Lights, Tiniteqilaaq, Greenland, 1997 Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery Mýrdalssandur, Iceland, 2016 Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery

“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.

Nenet’s Camp Side, Siberia, 2016 Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery

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.”