Lennart Nilsson’s Great Exploration in Science

Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson managed to capture a world out of sight. His passion of science and pure artistic talent shone a light on the origin of life — and changed humanity's perception of itself.

WORDS: ANDERS RYDELL, PHOTOGRAPHY: LENNART NILSSON

One of the first photographs that contributed to Lennart Nilsson’s international breakthrough is still haunting to look at. It was captured in 1947 outside Kvitøya in the Barents Sea, when the then young photographer travelled with M/S Harmoni from Tromsø to Kvitøya to capture a polar bear hunt.

On the ship deck lies a female polar bear with her limbs extended and her lifeless eyes shut. On top of her crawls a polar bear cub, still alive but with a rope wrapped around its neck. Desperate and exhausted, it seems to be trying to make contact with its mother. The photograph depicts their final embrace. ”It’s a sight I will never forget,” Lennart Nilsson explains. Anyone who has seen the photograph won’t as well, it’s the type of picture that etches itself onto both your emotional and visual nerves. In that sense, it’s a typical Lennart Nilsson photograph — both documentary, almost brutally naturalistic, but still characterised by beauty and tenderness. Simultaneously, it plants a seed for a recurring theme in Nilsson’s photography. Life — birth, parenting, and death.

Lennart Nilsson’s photographs from the polar bear hunt were first published in the Swedish magazine Se, but reached international recognition when the likes of Life Magazine shared them. The photographs raised both attention and heated debates. By 25 years of age Lennart Nilsson had already formed his role, his task was to document and tell stories that the world had never seen before. Few international photographers have lived up to this task like Lennart Nilsson has.

“I was fascinated by the fact that they had hands, eyes, and feet. It was amazing.”

Around a decade ago I visited Nilsson at the medical university Karolinska Institutet, and I was met with a lively and curious 88-year-old that was still capturing the mysteries of life in pictures — at that time, things beyond the visible world. A couple of years prior to my visit he had taken the first picture of the Sars virus, and if he was alive today he would probably have tried to capture the corona virus too. Despite being in his Autumnal years, he acted like a young and hungry press photographer in the medical laboratories — constantly on the lookout for new discoveries.

Nilsson was raised on the pungent smell of printing ink in magazine and newspaper newsrooms during the 1930s and 40s. He was born in 1922 and grew up in Strängnäs. His father worked at SJ, the Swedish train service, but was also an enthusiastic hobbyist photographer. Lennart Nilsson received his first camera when he was 12 years old and was already selling his photographs to newspapers and magazines as a teen. He had a unique feel for photojournalism together with a social gift — he made sure people felt safe in front of his camera. Not least with celebrities, who helped open the door for the young photographer. Some of them include the likes of Birgit Nilsson, Ingrid Bergman, Ingmar Bergman, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Gustav VI Adolf.

Lennart Nilsson made a name for himself as one of Sweden’s most prominent photojournalists. By the end of the 1940s Nilsson started to undertake various expeditions that were met with international attention. One of those was the earlier mentioned polar bear trip to Svalbard. In 1945, he followed midwife Siri Sundström’s daily work in the northern Swedish wilderness — where the only way of reaching women giving birth was by cross country skiing. Another of Nilsson’s most notable trips was his visit to the Belgian Congo in 1948.

Lennart Nilsson, The Djungle Photographer Mayola Amici, Belgian Congo 1948 “Congo”.

His interest in science had been ever-present since his youth. He would collect insects and was fascinated by the macro world, a world that was seldom documented in photographs. During the 1950s he would further explore nature photography. From water photography where he documented life beneath the surface through to life inside an anthill. This work resulted in the books Life in the Sea and Ants.

But it was a routine job in the early 1950s that would end up as his life’s work. During an assignment at Sabbatsbergs Hospital, he was shown embryos in formalin, kept for students of medicine. The photographer was fascinated by the creatures that only a few people outside hospitals had seen at that time. ”I was fascinated by the fact that they had hands, eyes, and feet. It was amazing,” he recalled. A doctor eventually let the eager young photographer take the embryo jars to his studio, where he photographed them. His first pictures of the embryos were published in Se and Life Magazine in 1953.

A couple of years later Nilsson started to document the origin of life through the development of fetuses. The work happened in collaboration with several hospitals. ”Some hospitals would call me when they had something for me. Often they’d call in the middle of the night. I’m very grateful that they allowed me to do it,” Nilsson told me when I interviewed him many years later. In order to succeed Nilsson had to constantly adapt his photographic technique, like developing new types of lenses. Most people thought it was simply impossible to photograph the origin of life — even the editors at Life Magazine were doubtful when Nilsson promised them coloured images of ”the different stages in human reproduction, from fertilisation to birth.”

The groundbreaking work resulted in one of the most famous publications to date, when an 18 week old fetus got the cover of Life Magazine in April 1965. The magazine’s multi-million edition sold out in a few days, and the pictures were spread around the world.

“Some hospitals would call me when they had something for me. Often they’d call in the middle of the night. I’m very grateful that they allowed me to do it.”

Just like the first pictures of the Earth and the moon landing a couple of years later, Nilsson’s photographs changed humanity's perception of itself, and the view of human origin. It was, in the truest meaning, groundbreaking.

Later that same year, the photobook A Child is Born was released with text from doctor Axel Ingelman-Sundberg. It is one of the highest selling photobooks ever, with new editions and translations still to this day. In collaboration with some of the world’s most prominent scientists and with constant development in technique and equipment, Nilsson released many renditions of the book over the following decades. The updated editions contained newer and more detailed photographs. Nilsson’s lengthy work in documenting the origin of life was not only innovative and visually striking — it was also a technical and scientific fulfillment. Thanks to his dedicated work, he drove the technical development in documenting biological and chemical processes with the help of microscopes, endoscopes, microlenses, and scanning electron microscopes. These advances also took him deeper into microcosms in the hunt for the origin of life.

Between 1965 and 1972 Nilsson had a special contract with Life Magazine. During the 1970s he started working with moving images — among other things, a collaboration with TV producer, Bo G. Eriksson.

After four years in the making, the movie The Miracle of Life was released in 1982. It showed the origin of man and successfully depicted the first division of the egg cell. The Miracle of Life was awarded two Emmys. In 1996, his movie Odyssey of Life also won an Emmy award.

Lennart Nilsson, The Winning Sperm, 1990 “A child is born”.

During the 1980s, Nilsson accomplished a new triumph — capturing the sperm cells journey into the egg. ”It was an incredible moment. When the sperm cells penetrated into the egg it started to shake and move like a planet. Counter clockwise. I had goosebumps when I saw it,” Nilsson said afterwards.

Nilsson’s curiosity and modesty lasted all his life. Despite being awarded with some of the finest prizes, like the Hasselbad prize and the Emmy, and being named triple honorary doctor and state professor, he stated, ”awards mean nothing to me.” It was his constant desire to explore and tell photographic stories that pushed him.

Sven Lidman described Lennart Nilsson as, ”someone much more than a photographer. In fact, he belongs in the same category as the great explorers of the last century. These travellers were obsessed with the desire to explore the unknown. ”Fittingly, Nilsson’s most poetic honour was perhaps the ones in the Voyager probes that got sent into space in the late 1970s. The probes included photographs of the origin of human life, from the fertilisation of the egg cell to its division. These pictures would explain to potential alien life, how humans came to be. The probes are today the oldest human-made objects that have travelled the furthest in space. They are still travelling through the milky way, carrying Lennart Nilsson's heritage and legacy.

Lennart Nilsson passed away on January 28, 2017.