Iceland - Born in 1958

Man and Winter

For Ragnar Axelsson, winter is not coming: winter has always been here. The man known simply as ‘Rax’ was born in Iceland in March 1958 – in the depths of winter, fittingly. His has been a life of ice, blizzards and piteraq, the katabatic wind that sweeps over the Arctic polar ice cap and howls over the icy steppes of Greenland and Iceland. The same wind that constantly blows through Axelsson’s photos. He has taken photographic possession of this sublime white yet hostile world. For over thirty years, he has strived to document every aspect of these frozen lands, where the people of the extreme cold live in harmony with the area’s wildlife.
His exemplary work on sled dogs underscores how the potential extinction of this iconic animal threatens the very survival of the traditional Inuit 4,000-year-old way of life. With unrivalled mastery of black and white, which he uses not as a short cut to aesthetics but as a form of photographic syntax to shape his narrative, ‘Rax’ captures with equal mastery the snow-bitten jaws of a wolf-dog and the windblown face of a hunter wandering along a wave-drenched, gale-swept Dyrhólaey beach.
Axelsson has worked as a photojournalist for the daily Icelandic newspaper Morgunblaðið since 1976, and alternates long-term projects with more ad-hoc reports for the newspaper. He is currently in the midst of creating an extensive series on the eight Arctic countries, where the effects of global warming are increasingly devastating. A photographic journey deep into the cold.

LABYRINTHE VÉGÉTAL