Overview

For forty-five years, Icelandic photographer Ragnar Axelsson has observed the farmers of his homeland during the sheep roundups - a centuries-old tradition that unfolds across the country's dramatic highlands. Every autumn, sheep farmers of Landmannaafrettur uphold this ancient practice of communal herding, navigating the rugged landscape on horseback or foot to gather their flocks from summer pastures. Battling unpredictable weather, they drive the sheep into a central pen for sorting - a ritual unchanged for centuries in one of Iceland's most breathtaking and challenging terrains. Landmannaafrettur, a remote highland region in southern Iceland, is a striking geological landscape shaped by volcanic activity, tectonic shifts, and extreme weather. Situated between the volcano Hekla and the glacial area Jokulheimar, it lies in an active volcanic zone along the rift between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. The area hosts multiple volcanic systems and Iceland's largest geothermal site, Landmannalaugar. Glacial erosion and geothermal forces have sculpted an ever-changing terrain of obsidian fields, black sand, steaming fumaroles, and vibrant mineral pools. In Behind Mountains, Axelsson presents powerful, atmospheric black-and-white photographs that vividly document the interaction between people, animals, and the rugged landscape.

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9783969001950

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Ragnar Axelsson, also known as Rax, (b. 1958, Iceland), 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. He was a photojournalist at Morgunbladid, the leading Icelandic newspaper, (1976-2020), and has worked on freelance assignments 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.

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