For many months we asked photographers to send us a piece of audio no longer than five minutes in length to include on our A Photographic Life podcast. These became a book which is now out of print, but remain in audio form within the podcast archive, available wherever you get your podcasts . However, we are responding to listener requests and offering transcriptions of some of our favourite contributions. Enjoy!

Ragnar Axelsson was born in 1958 and, for the past 40 years, he has been photographing the people, animals, and landscape of the most remote regions of the Arctic. A photojournalist at the Icelandic newspaper Morgunbladid since 1976, his photographs have featured in LIFE, Newsweek, Stern, GEO, National Geographic,and Time, and have been exhibited widely. Ragnar has published seven books in various international editions, including The Face of The North, 2016, with a foreword by Mary Ellen Mark, that won the 2016 Icelandic Literary Prize for non-fiction. His most recent, Glacier was published in 2018. Ragnar’s work has been recognised through numerous Icelandic Photojournalist Awards, The Leica Oskar Barnack Award (Honorable Mention) and Iceland’s highest honour, the Order of the Falcon, Knight’s Cross. Ragnar is currently working on a ten-year project documenting people’s lives in all eight countries of the Arctic. At this pivotal time, as climate change irrevocably disrupts the physical and traditional realities of their world, Ragnar is bearing witness to the immediate and direct threat that changes in the climate poses to their survival.

“Photography means everything to me it’s been such a big part of my life since I was ten-years-old when I got my father’s Leica to take photographs on a farm where I stayed as a kid. I photographed the people, the farmers, the landscape.

Looking back on the masters of photography, like Eugene Smith, Cartier Bresson, Mary Ellen Mark, James Nachtway, Salgado and Don McCullin, those masters did extraordinary things in photography. They give drive to every photographer who’s keen on doing things that matters. To me the best journalists in the world, the best documentary people in the world are photographers and filmmakers. They have to be where the bullets are flying, in extreme places, dancing on the edge, being where the cold is almost killing you, to show the world what’s really going on.

I’ve been photographing the Arctic for forty years there are a lot of things happening there; it is melting, the villages are closing down and the hunters are declining. I’ve been documenting this life and, with three friends, I have set up a publishing company to do books and exhibitions about the Arctic because we believe it has to be shown, no matter what people think about climate change. It has to be documented because it is happening now.

I look at the masters I have mentioned as my friends because they are my teachers and mentors. Don McCullin is like The Beatles to me and everyone wants to be The Beatles. Mary Ellen came to Iceland and she taught me so much, the passion she had until the end was just enormous.

I believe photography will live, some people say it’s dead, the golden years are over, but photography is my life and it always will be. My passion is for black and white, I grew up in the darkroom, where my father showed me things, so I grew up with film but digital is so great today and I do with digital what I do in the darkroom. I make my own rules. I print in the darkroom, I burn, and dodge and I do the same with digital pictures.

Documentary work has to be honest. I think and I dream in pictures and I will keep on dreaming, it is a quest for every photographer, and it takes a lifetime. Maybe you will get the picture and maybe you will not but at least you tried.” 

Image: © Ragnar Axelsson

© Grant Scott 2026