NEW YORK, NY.- Arctic Heroes takes a poignant look at the fate of the Greenlandic 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 dog, essential to Inuit settlement and survival, now faces extinction as hunters are forced to adapt to the vanishing world around them. The sled dog population has shrunk from about 30,000 in 2009 to about 12,000 in 2019.

In approximately 150 stunning images, and through hunters’ personal stories, retold by the author, this book bears witness to the animals’ magnificence and the deep, integral role they play in the hunters’ lives.

The photographs included in this book were taken in Greenland between 1986 and 2020.

For over forty years, Icelandic photographer Ragnar Axelsson, also known as RAX (b. 1958), 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 Axelsson has published seven books in various international editions.

Awards for his work include numerous Icelandic Photojournalist Awards; the Icelandic Literary Prize for non-fiction; The Leica Oskar Barnack Award (Honorable Mention); The Grand Prize, Photo de Mer, Vannes; and Iceland’s highest honor, the Order of the Falcon, Knight’s Cross.

Arctic Heroes was on the Shortlist for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2020.

From the text Where the World is Melting by Ragnar Axelsson: »Imagine waking up early one morning in the world’s northernmost settlement — midwinter, pitch black outside. The baying of a lonesome dog pierces the silence. Outside it is bitterly cold. The village itself seems to be asleep. No one is up and about. The howling multiplies as the village dogs wake each other up. The plaintive call of the Greenlandic sled dog bears with it an unexpected solace that soothes the soul. Its wistful song is the story of the greatest heroes the North has ever known, heroes who have made it possible for mankind to reach both poles of the Earth. A tenacious creature that, at the bleakest point in a raging Arctic storm, will bring its hunters home safe and sound.

The song of Greenland’s dogs is one that has echoed through the ages. There is perhaps a message in its sorrowful baying that ought to be heeded: the world around it is quickly changing. (...)

‘There would be no Inuit without the Greenlandic dog,’ said an elderly Greenlandic woman who has lived through the old times and the new. ‘It has kept us alive for 4000 years,’ she continued.

Nothing under the sun lasts forever. And now the importance of the dog is waning. The snowmobile has taken over, and the dogs are dwindling in number just like their hunters.«