Every autumn, from early September, Iceland’s réttir takes place; the country’s annual sheep round-up. Ragnar Axelsson has returned to the mountains to capture the event nearly every year for the past four decades. The resulting collection of images is now collected in a stunning new book, Behind Mountains.
In B+W 305 Ragnar discusses his powerful documentary work, his love of cold places and the importance of recording cultural traditions before they disappear.
‘Personally, I like to photograph people in the landscape,’ he says. ‘You get a deeper story. If you take a picture of a mountain, that mountain’s going to be there for thousands of years. You can copy it. But you can’t copy life in the mountains because it’ll be gone. You’re capturing a moment; it’s never coming back. You never know when a photograph becomes a historic or legendary photograph, like when you look through the work of W. Eugene Smith and Don McCullin, those great photographers.’
Read Ragnar’s full interview with Graeme Green in B+W 305.