In the opening scene of Jørgen Leth's celebrated cycling documentary about the 1976 Paris-Roubaix race, A Sunday in Hell, Francesco Moser's mechanic cleans a bike meticulously. His brush flicks back and forth across the chain while the clacking from the drivetrain creates a symphony in the background. Later, as the riders approach the start line, industrial protestors block their path. The protesters eventually part, allowing the cyclists they revere to flow through single file. Cycling, Leth was showing, is not simply a matter of blood, sweat and tears during a race, but of great ritual, passion and narrative beyond.

For Timm Kölln, the German photographer acclaimed for his graphic series of portraits called The Peloton, where exhausted riders posed seconds after dismounting their bikes, the context that surrounds cycling is a similar source of fascination. "Everything in traditional cycling photography is about power and epic emotion," he says. "But in reality, there is a lot of loneliness." While fellow photographers precariously shoot from motorbikes to try to witness every second of the action, Kölln's lens points towards characters and details at the fringes of the sport.

An old woman waving Norwegian flags waits for the peloton to pass. Photograph: Timm Kölln

His latest series, shot recently at the newly founded Arctic Race of Norway, is one of his least explicit studies of cycling yet – and his most telling. It examines a region of Scandinavia where professional cycling is unfamiliar but emerging. Through monochrome portraits of local workers and young riders, presented alongside colour images of spectators and landscapes, Kölln shows the relationship between cycling and community.

"When I first read about the Arctic Race I thought 'what's this?'," he says. "The cycling calendar is usually so fixed. But cycling is having a boom in the region right now and I thought this idea was very fresh. I knew I didn't want to make a race report. I wanted to go and find representations of the life up there – the place, the people and then the sport. It was a commercial event, but this was really a race for local people. It's like how it was 60 years ago at the Tour de France."

In one pair of photographs, a man in full Viking attire is contrasted with a reserved young cyclist cornered amid his strewn apparel; in another, a proud marble quarry worker is juxtaposed with a hopeful rider. Though the inclusion of local employees, all of whom were shot along the race's route, appears peculiar at first, they do give a clearer sense that Kölln is tracing the lines between the area's rich heritage and its future.

The beautiful landscape through which the race took place. Photograph: Timm Kölln

His portraits are shot in black and white so he can "concentrate" the focus. The vibrant aerial shots, meanwhile, are immediately alluring, though close inspection of their scale reveals an unexpected deception. "The mountains are not that high and roads don't go up them," he says. "So you capture these beautiful landscapes with nice light, but the riders don't race up there. The stages are all flat and it's just a sprint. But I've always wanted to photograph from a helicopter and I knew it would be the only way to transport the beauty of the landscape."

Kölln's interest in landscapes has been visualised through past works, most notably his pinhole experiments on Lo Stelvio pass in Italy, and while he stresses his work is generally not of that ilk, those images reinforce his status as an unorthodox photographer. Indeed, he is the only photographer among the cycling fraternity to use film religiously.

A man bathes in a lake close to the route of the Arctic Race. Photograph: Timm Kölln

Following the completion of his book The Peloton, which began with portraits of T-Mobile riders at the Giro d'Italia in 2005, Kölln became a regular contributor to Rouleur magazine and has since created a body of work that takes in many sides of the sport he loves. There is one image in his latest series that epitomises his eye for the offbeat; it is of an old man bathing in a pristine lake with his bicycle propped on nearby rocks. It is a simple observation of how, even in the remoteness of the Arctic circle, the bond between people and cycling runs deep.

• An exhibition featuring work by Timm Kölln and Olaf Unverzart, titled Das muss man doch sehen, will be held at Pavlov's Dog gallery in Berlin from 15 November to 14 December. Kölln's Arctic Race images will be published in Rouleur cycling magazine this month