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.
In many Arctic towns, locals have swapped animal-skin outfits for layered Gore-Tex, harpoons for rifles, and sleds for snowmobiles. But, in the least accessible areas, sled dogs are irreplaceable.
“Unlike a snowmobile, a good trained dog can lead you home in a storm. Engines fail. But the dogs never fail. Loyal, strong, selfless, uncomplaining—step after frozen step, sled dogs have hauled people to the limits of the earth, at both poles. They are the greatest heroes the North has ever known.”
- Ragnar Axelsson