“It’s not easy to photograph the Arctic,” he says. “You are photographing in the coldest of conditions, and you have to try to get that coldness into the photo.”
The series conveys the effects of climate change on remote lands and their inhabitants. Its black-and-white photographs are harsh, barren and yearning – delicately revealing a region in transition. From a man standing on sea ice in 1980s Greenland to a child in Siberia near a campground in 2016, his images give an intimate look into the Arctic’s past, present, and uncertain future.
Axelsson recounts a time when he had first begun documenting and speaking to the communities, and he passed by an elderly man in Qaanaaq, Greenland. With the help of Axelsson’s translator, the man explained that something was wrong and that their world was slowly changing.
“These people are a part of nature and so they sense things in a different way from most other people,” he says. “My focus from the very beginning was to document this change, and I knew it would be a long-term project.”
According to POLITICO, Greenland’s ice sheets are losing 270 billion tonnes of water per year, as the climate crisis intensifies. 2024 saw the hottest year ever on record across the world, passing the 1.5C threshold set by the Paris agreement for the first time, while some projections predict that there will be zero ice left in the polar sea as soon as 2030.
Meanwhile, the President elect of the USA, Donald Trump, has announced a desire to take over Greenland – refusing to rule out using military or economic force to do so – with some reports suggesting that he is looking to take advantage of the area’s believed natural resources and strategic trading route geography once the ice has melted.
