One can almost hear the ice cracking beneath the lens. The Icelander Ragnar Axelsson—RAX to those close to him— tirelessly roams the northern reaches where the habitable world falters. His photographs, of striking austerity, bear witness to the metamorphosis of Arctic landscapes and the inexorable dissolution of an ancestral culture. “The broken, rough texture of the icefalls is disturbing to look at, but it is also almost beautiful,” he confides. This harsh, almost unbearable beauty permeates each of the 149 duotone images that compose this magisterial opus.
The photographer did not simply document. He lived it. “I’ve travelled to Greenland, stopping nowhere too long, I’ve stayed with hunters in tents and cabins in all manner of weather and followed them to the best of my ability through the unimaginable hardship they endure to provide for themselves,” he recounts. This immersion alongside the Inuit of Northern Canada and Greenland, the farmers and fishermen of Iceland and the Faroe Islands, the Indigenous peoples of Northern Scandinavia and Siberia, pervades every frame. Ragnar Axelsson does not observe from afar; he shares their harsh existence, earns their trust, becomes an ambassador for these lives hanging in the balance.
Certain images, including Kötlujökull Melting, embody this geological rupture with phenomenal force. The glacier disintegrates in an ethereal mist, its jagged ridges rising like gutted cathedrals against a milky sky. The vapor ascending from the black earth resembles a soul leaving a dying body. “An alluring light spreads across the landscape when the snow melts in the spring. It’s as if the mountains were awakening with dewy eyes,” describes Ragnar Axelsson, speaking of this series soberly titled “Black Landscape”. The majesty of the spectacle does not conceal the underlying horror: what we behold is vanishing before our eyes, grain by grain, centimeter by centimeter.
Other photographs reveal humanity’s stubborn struggle against unleashed elements. In Horse Rescue, phantom silhouettes emerge from the blizzard, striving to save horses buried in the snowstorm. The scene takes on an epic, almost mythological dimension. These men and beasts are reduced to shadows battling in blinding white chaos. “The glacial storm, a piteraq, forms when strong winds blow down from mountain summits 3,000 meters high. The cold and heavy air speeds down the glacier, accelerating like a huge invisible river rushing out to sea and sparing nothing on its path,” the photographer continues.
Portraits constitute the other dimension of this body of work. We discover the weathered face of Jonas Madsen in the Faroe Islands, that of Masauna Kristiansen in Thule. These figures, carved by polar winds, carry within them the entire history of millennial resistance. In 1988, the vision of Axel Thorarensen, a fisherman in Gjögur, departing from shore in his rowboat, triggers a photographic quest spanning decades. “My time with Axel was the impetus for this project. As his boat cruised out of the fjord, it was as if a voice from inside was telling me that I would photograph him and his kind. His world was quickly changing—vanishing,” the artist confides.
Beyond the aesthetic dimension and the profound humanity emanating from his work, Isabel Siben, Director of the Kunstfoyer in Munich and curator of the exhibition “Where the World is Melting”, emphasizes its prophetic quality. “Behind his photographs there lies the firm conviction that the traditional culture of the Arctic population is not only in the process of vanishing, but it is unable to withstand the destructive effects of such major forces as the economy and climate change,” she analyzes. Yet this lucidity never descends into miserabilism or facile exoticism. Ragnar Axelsson documents with quasi-scientific rigor while preserving the profound humanity of his subjects. “It is to these people, forced by climate change to adapt their centuries-old lifestyle to changing conditions or even to abandon it, that this book and exhibition are dedicated,” she specifies.
The singularity of Ragnar Axelsson’s vision also stems from his early formative years. At age seven, dazzled, he discovered the gaping crevasses of glaciers from the porthole of a Douglas DC-3. “That was the beginning of an adventure that still hasn’t come to an end,” he confides. The eight summers spent on the isolated farm at Kvísker, at the foot of the Öræfajökull volcano, forged his eye and determination. “Growing up in the countryside with self-educated people who did scientific work along with their farm chores made an invaluable contribution to the course of my life,” he acknowledges. This telluric education explains his ease in navigating between worlds, moving from glaciers to human communities, from the infinitely vast to the microscopically small.
Black and white imposes itself upon him as a radical aesthetic choice. Not out of affectation, but because it confers upon the images a timeless, almost archaeological dimension. The sharp contrasts sculpt ice and stone, carve wrinkles into faces, intensify the harshness of these existences on the margins of the livable. “With the gaze of the researcher and artist, he analyses even the smallest natural structures, which are reminiscent of modern drawings by the likes of Paul Klee or Per Kirkeby,” observes Isabel Siben. This capacity to discern abstraction in the concrete, geometry in natural chaos, elevates his work to the status of a full-fledged artistic oeuvre.
Beyond photography, Ragnar Axelsson embodies the figure of the committed witness. An experienced pilot, he has flown over Icelandic glaciers with artist Ólafur Elíasson during his glacier-based art project. He has accompanied climatologists Stefan Rahmstorf and Michael Mann to melting glaciers. With volcanologist Haraldur Sigurðsson, he has investigated the blue lakes on Greenland’s melting glacier. “A photojournalist at Morgunblaðið since 1976,” his career also encompasses assignments in Latvia, Lithuania, Mozambique, South Africa, China, and Ukraine. This protean dimension nourishes a global vision of planetary upheavals.
The series “Faces of the North”, “Last Days of the Arctic”, “Glacier”, “Arctic Heroes”, and “Siberia” unfold in the book like so many chapters of a twilight elegy. The Siberian series reveals centuries-old trees emerging from the tundra, silent witnesses to an ancestral struggle. “The white wasteland stretches as far as the eye can see. The reindeer sleigh continues to push forward on the glowing frozen crust of snow,” describes Ragnar Axelsson. The permafrost melts, deep craters form. “What does the future hold for the reindeer herders living in the tundra? Nobody really knows,” he questions. This uncertainty hovers over every image.
“What seems small from the sky is monstrous on the surface. The white desert tricks the eye,” the photographer warns when evoking the glacier crevasses. This distortion of scale also applies to the ongoing climate catastrophe: invisible to the naked eye in daily life, it proves titanic when one embraces the historical perspective. In 2019, Iceland’s Okjökull lost its glacier status, its ice mass having become too meager. A commemorative plaque now bears this epitaph: “A letter to the future: Okjökull is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. It is anticipated that, in the next 200 years, all our glaciers will go the same way.”
Ragnar Axelsson photographs this farewell to the cold, fixing for posterity these final moments of a millennial Arctic civilization confronting its twilight. “A photograph is only a small piece in the jigsaw that makes up the big picture, but sometimes it is these small pieces that open our eyes to the broader reality,” he philosophizes. His work constitutes precisely this fragmentary yet essential mosaic, this irreplaceable testimony of a world melting before our transfixed gaze. The terrible beauty of these images offers no consolation. It confronts us with our collective responsibility in the face of the announced disaster. In doing so, it stands as a major work of climate urgency.
Ragnar Axelsson’s book, Where the World is Melting, is published by Kehrer Verlag and available for €49.
The exhibition “Where the World is Melting”, curated by Isabel Siben will be presented at the Ernst Leitz Museum in Wetzlar until May 29, 2026.
