Arctic Heroes takes a poignant look at the fate of the Greenland sled dog. In Greenland, where the melting ice sheet is irrevocably disrupting the hunters' 4,000-year old traditional way of life, the stark reality of global warming is an immediate and direct threat to their everyday survival. The Greenland sled dog, essential to Inuit settlement and survival, now faces extinction as hunters are forced to adapt to the vanishing world around them. In over 150 images, and through hunters' personal stories, this book bears witness to the animals' magnificence and the deep, integral role they play in the hunters' lives.
For over forty years, Icelandic photographer Ragnar Axelsson, also known as RAX (b. 1958), has been photographing the people, animals, and landscape of the most remote regions of the Arctic, including Iceland, Siberia, and Greenland. 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 the unprecedented changes in climate.
A photojournalist at Morgunbladid since 1976, Ragnar has also worked on freelance assignment in Latvia, Lithuania, Mozambique, South Africa, China, and Ukraine. His photographs have been featured in LIFE, Newsweek, Stern, GEO, National Geographic, Time, and Polka, and have been exhibited widely.
Ragnar Axelsson has published seven books in various international editions. Awards for his work include numerous Icelandic Photojournalist Awards; the Icelandic Literary Prize for non-fiction; The Leica Oskar Barnack Award (Honorable Mention); The Grand Prize, Photo de Mer, Vannes; and Iceland's highest honour, the Order of the Falcon, Knight's Cross. Arctic Heroes is on the Shortlist Leica for the Oskar Barnack Award 2020.