"The world turns its gaze toward the Arctic. Nowhere are the signs of climate change more visible; here global warming already affects the day-to-day lives of the local people. Still the circumpolar Arctic is one of the most disputed territories on Earth, with many nations laying claim to the mining and oil rights of the area as the sea ice retreats. For thousands of years the Inuit have built their communities based upon a sensitive understanding of the land and the frozen ocean, but rapid social and environmental change threatens their traditional way of life. The hunters of the North are a dying breed. This is the twilight of their society." (rax.is)
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3yxDnaben4]
Ragnar Axelsson is an Icelandic photographer and photojournalist, born in 1958. He has worked for the Icelandic newspaper Morgunblaðið since 1976 and as a freelance shooting projects in various parts of the world for numerous magazines and agencies. The North has for a long time fascinated him and different aspects of north appeared in his photography regurarly. In 2004, he published "Faces of the north", a collection of his black and white photographs of traditional ways of life in Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland taken over a period of fifteen years, preserving that way a glimpse of a lifestyle that is gradually vanishing.
His newest publication "Last days of the Arctic" is a breathtaking introduction to a life of Greenlandic hunters in the most remote communities in the world. Professor Mark Nuttall, one of the leading Arctic scholars, wrote the foreword for the book, which in sincere and simple way represents the part of world that we now watch changing.
To learn more about Ragnar Axelsson, please visit his homepage.
Here below you can see a documentary of him made by his son Jón Snær Ragnarsson. The film is in icelandic only.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPdnjLSvG1Q]