Ragnar Axelsson, known as RAX, is an Icelandic photographer. He was born in Reykjavík in 1958. For over 40 years, he has photographed the people, animals and landscape of the Arctic, including Iceland, Siberia and Greenland. He works in black and white. From 1976 to 2020 he was a photojournalist at the newspaper Morgunblaðið. His photographs have appeared in LIFE, Newsweek, Stern, GEO, National Geographic and Time.
His book Faces of the North won the Icelandic Literary Prize for non-fiction for 2016. He has also received an Honorable Mention at the Leica Oskar Barnack Award and the Knight's Cross of the Icelandic Order of the Falcon. He is working on a ten-year project about people's lives in all eight countries of the Arctic.
His book Behind Mountains was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2025. It has 192 pages. It shows the autumn sheep roundup in Landmannaafréttur, a remote highland region of Iceland. Axelsson has followed the roundups for 45 years. His book Arctic Heroes: A Tribute to the Sled Dogs of Greenland came out with Kehrer Verlag in 2020.
