RAGNAR AXELSSON

THE ARTIC POET

Ragnar Axelsson, or “Rax”, is an Icelandic photographer, a poetic warrior, an Artic explorer, and a very nice guy. His powerful and breath-taking photographs are testament to the fact that Rax is willing to go to great lengths to document the vanishing lifestyles and landscapes of the far north.

For over 40 years, Ragnar has photographed the people and wildlife of the Artic region. In his ice-cold, monochrome images, he documents the extraordinary relationships between the people of the Arctic and their extreme environment, and how this is changing due to global warming. Ragnar looks at mother nature through the viewfinder of the heart; his breath-taking work has an emotive power that elicits awe, engagement, sadness.

Ragnar has worked as a photojournalist and on freelance assignments in many countries. His photographs have been featured in LIFE, Newsweek, Stern, GEO, National Geographic, Time, and Polka and have been exhibited widely. Ragnar has published more than seven books and won several awards for his work, among them the Icelandic Literary Prize and the Leica Oskar Barnack Award.

“It is like a poem of the Icelandic glaciers. You see all kinds of figures and faces in the ice that comes from volcanoes. It's like going to a fairytale when you see it from an aircraft.”

-RAGNAR AXELSSON