Arctic Heroes: A Tribute to the Sled Dogs of Greenland

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. The subjects of Icelandic photographer Ragnar Axelsson, also known as RAX (b. 1958), are people, animals, and landscape, but the focus of his work is the extraordinary relationships the people of the Arctic have developed with their extreme environment.


About the Author
For over 40 years, Ragnar Axelsson, Rax, (b. 1958, Iceland), 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 free-lance 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 has published 7 books in various international editions. His most recent, Jökull (Glacier) was published in 2018, with a foreword by Olafur Eliasson. Andlit Nordursins (The Face of The North), was published in 2016, with a foreword by Mary Ellen Mark, and won the 2016 Icelandic Literary Prize for non-fiction.