Lennart Nilsson is a Swedish

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

 photographer

Photography

Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...

 and scientist. He is noted for his photographs of in vivo

In vivo

In vivo is experimentation using a whole, living organism as opposed to a partial or dead organism, or an in vitro controlled environment. Animal testing and clinical trials are two forms of in vivo research...

human

Human

Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...

 embryo

Embryo

An embryo is a multicellular diploid eukaryote in its earliest stage of development, from the time of first cell division until birth, hatching, or germination...

s and other medical

Medicine

Medicine is the science and art of healing. It encompasses a variety of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness....

 subjects once considered unphotographable, and more generally for his extreme macro photography

Macro photography

Macrophotography is close-up photography, usually of very small subjects. Classically a macrophotograph is one in which the size of the subject on the negative is greater than life size. However in modern use it refers to a finished photograph of a subject at greater than life size...

. He is also considered to be among Sweden

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

’s first modern photojournalists

Photojournalism

Photojournalism is a particular form of journalism that creates images in order to tell a news story. It is now usually understood to refer only to still images, but in some cases the term also refers to video used in broadcast journalism...

.

Biography

Lennart Nilsson was born on August 24, 1922 in Strängnäs

Strängnäs

Strängnäs is a locality and the seat of Strängnäs Municipality, Södermanland County, Sweden with 12,296 inhabitants in 2005. It is located by Lake Mälaren and is the episcopal see of the Diocese of Strängnäs, a former Roman Catholic and present Lutheran Diocese, with the Strängnäs Cathedral, built...

, Sweden. His father and uncle were both photographers. His father gave him his first camera

Camera

A camera is a device that records and stores images. These images may be still photographs or moving images such as videos or movies. The term camera comes from the camera obscura , an early mechanism for projecting images...

 at age twelve. When he was approximately fifteen, he saw a documentary about Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur was a French chemist and microbiologist born in Dole. He is remembered for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and preventions of diseases. His discoveries reduced mortality from puerperal fever, and he created the first vaccine for rabies and anthrax. His experiments...

 that made him interested in microscopy

Microscopy

Microscopy is the technical field of using microscopes to view samples and objects that cannot be seen with the unaided eye...

. Within a few years, Nilsson had acquired a microscope

Microscope

A microscope is an instrument used to see objects that are too small for the naked eye. The science of investigating small objects using such an instrument is called microscopy...

 and was making microphotographs of insect

Insect

Insects are a class of living creatures within the arthropods that have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body , three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes, and two antennae...

s.

In his late teens and twenties, he began taking a series of environmental portrait

Environmental portrait

An environmental portrait is a portrait executed in the subject's usual environment, such as in their home or workplace, and typically illuminates the subject's life and surroundings...

s with an Icoflex Zeiss camera, and had the opportunity to photograph many famous Swedes.

He began his professional career in the mid-1940s as a freelance

Freelancer

A freelancer, freelance worker, or freelance is somebody who is self-employed and is not committed to a particular employer long term. These workers are often represented by a company or an agency that resells their labor and that of others to its clients with or without project management and...

 photographer, working frequently for the publisher Åhlen & Åkerlund of Stockholm

Stockholm

Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...

. One of his earliest assignments was covering the liberation of Norway

Norway

Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

 in 1945 during World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

. Some of his early photo essay

Photo essay

A photo-essay is a set or series of photographs that are intended to tell a story or evoke a series of emotions in the viewer. A photo essay will often show pictures in deep emotional stages. Photo essays range from purely photographic works to photographs with captions or small notes to full text...

s, notably A Midwife

Midwifery

Midwifery is a health care profession in which providers offer care to childbearing women during pregnancy, labour and birth, and during the postpartum period. They also help care for the newborn and assist the mother with breastfeeding....

 in Lapland

Lapland (region)

Lapland is a region in northern Fennoscandia, largely within the Arctic Circle. It streches across Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula . On the North it is bounded by the Barents Sea, on the West by the Norwegian Sea and on the East by the White Sea...

  (1945), Polar Bear

Polar Bear

The polar bear is a bear native largely within the Arctic Circle encompassing the Arctic Ocean, its surrounding seas and surrounding land masses. It is the world's largest land carnivore and also the largest bear, together with the omnivorous Kodiak Bear, which is approximately the same size...

 Hunting in Spitzbergen

Svalbard

Svalbard is an archipelago in the Arctic, constituting the northernmost part of Norway. It is located north of mainland Europe, midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. The group of islands range from 74° to 81° north latitude , and from 10° to 35° east longitude. Spitsbergen is the...

 (1947), and Fishermen at the Congo River

Congo River

The Congo River is a river in Africa, and is the deepest river in the world, with measured depths in excess of . It is the second largest river in the world by volume of water discharged, though it has only one-fifth the volume of the world's largest river, the Amazon...

 (1948), brought him international attention after publication in Life, Illustrated, Picture Post, and elsewhere.

In 1954, eighty-seven of his portraits of famous Swedes were published in the book Sweden in Profile. His 1955 book, Reportage, featured a selection of his early work. In 1963 his photoessay about the Swedish Salvation Army

Salvation Army

The Salvation Army is a Protestant Christian church known for its thrift stores and charity work. It is an international movement that currently works in over a hundred countries....

 appeared in several magazines and in his book Hallelujah.

In the mid-1950s he began experimenting with new photographic techniques to make extreme close-up photographs. These advances, combined with very thin endoscopes

Endoscopy

Endoscopy means looking inside and typically refers to looking inside the body for medical reasons using an endoscope , an instrument used to examine the interior of a hollow organ or cavity of the body. Unlike most other medical imaging devices, endoscopes are inserted directly into the organ...

 that became available in the mid-1960s, enabled him to make groundbreaking photographs of living human blood vessel

Blood vessel

The blood vessels are the part of the circulatory system that transports blood throughout the body. There are three major types of blood vessels: the arteries, which carry the blood away from the heart; the capillaries, which enable the actual exchange of water and chemicals between the blood and...

s and body cavities. He achieved international fame in 1965, when his photographs of the beginning of human life appeared on the cover and on sixteen pages of Life magazine. They were also published in Stern

Stern (magazine)

Stern is a weekly news magazine published in Germany. It was founded in 1948 by Henri Nannen, and is currently published by Gruner + Jahr, a subsidiary of Bertelsmann. In the first quarter of 2006, its print run was 1.019 million copies and it reached 7.84 million readers according to...

, Paris Match, The Sunday Times

The Sunday Times (UK)

The Sunday Times is a Sunday broadsheet newspaper, distributed in the United Kingdom. The Sunday Times is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of News International, which is in turn owned by News Corporation. Times Newspapers also owns The Times, but the two papers were founded...

, and elsewhere. The photographs made up a part of the book, A Child is Born

A Child Is Born (book)

A Child Is Born is a 1965 photographic book by Swedish photojournalist Lennart Nilsson...

 (1965); image from the book were reproduced in the April 30 1965 edition of Life

Life (magazine)

Life generally refers to three American magazines:*A humor and general interest magazine published from 1883 to 1936. Time founder Henry Luce bought the magazine in 1936 solely so that he could acquire the rights to its name....

, which sold eight million copies in the first four days after publication. Some of the photographs from this book were later included on both Voyager

Voyager program

The Voyager program is a U.S program that launched two unmanned space missions, scientific probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. They were launched in 1977 to take advantage of a favorable planetary alignment of the late 1970s...

 spacecraft

Spacecraft

A spacecraft or spaceship is a craft or machine designed for spaceflight. Spacecraft are used for a variety of purposes, including communications, earth observation, meteorology, navigation, planetary exploration and transportation of humans and cargo....

.

In 1969 he began using a scanning electron microscope

Scanning electron microscope

A scanning electron microscope is a type of electron microscope that images a sample by scanning it with a high-energy beam of electrons in a raster scan pattern...

 on a Life assignment to depict the body’s functions. He is generally credited with taking the first images of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus

HIV

Human immunodeficiency virus is a lentivirus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome , a condition in humans in which progressive failure of the immune system allows life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers to thrive...

, and in 2003, he took the first image of the SARS virus.

Around 1970 he joined the staff of the Karolinska Institutet and has worked there since.

Nilsson has also been involved in the creation of documentaries

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

, including The Saga of Life (1982) and The Miracle of Life (1996).

Awards and honors

Nilsson became a member of the Swedish Society of Medicine in 1969, received an honorary doctorate in medicine from Karolinska Institute in 1976, an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy from the Technische Universität Braunschweig

Technische Universität Braunschweig

The TU Braunschweig is the oldest University of Technology in Germany. It was founded in 1745 as Collegium Carolinum and is a member of TU9, an incorporated society of the most renowned and largest German Institutes of Technology. Today it has about 13,000 students, making it the third largest...

 in Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 in 2002, and an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy from Linköping University

Linköping University

Linköping University is a state university in Linköping, Sweden. Linköping University was granted full university status in 1975 and is now one of Sweden's larger academic institutions. Education, research and PhD training are the mission of four faculties: Arts and Sciences, Educational...

 in Sweden in 2003. He won the Swedish Academy Nordic Authors’ Prize, the first Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography

Hasselblad Award

The Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography is an award granted to "a photographer recognized for major achievements".The award – and the foundation – was set up from the estate of Erna and Victor Hasselblad...

 (in 1980), the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences’ Big Gold Medal in 1989, and in 2002 received the 12th presentation of the Swedish government’s Illis Quorum. His documentaries won Emmy award

Emmy Award

An Emmy Award, often referred to simply as the Emmy, is a television production award, similar in nature to the Peabody Awards but more focused on entertainment, and is considered the television equivalent to the Academy Awards and the Grammy Awards .A majority of Emmys are presented in various...

s in 1982 and 1996.

Nilsson’s work is on exhibit in many locations, including the British Museum

British Museum

The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...

 in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum, and the Modern Museum in Stockholm.

Since 1998, the Lennart Nilsson Award

Lennart Nilsson Award

The Lennart Nilsson Award recognizes outstanding contributions to scientific photography. It is administered by the Lennart Nilsson Foundation and awarded annually by Karolinska Institutet. The award sum is SEK 100,000...

 has been presented annually during the Karolinska Institute's installation ceremony. It is given in recognition of extraordinary photography of science

Science

Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...

 and is sponsored by the Lennart Nilsson Foundation.

Works

Books

• 1959 Myror (Ants)
• 1959 Liv i hav (Life in the Ocean)
• 1963 Halleluja, en bok om frälsningsarmén (Hallelujah, a book about the Salvation Army)
• 1965, 1976, 1990, 2003 Ett barn blir till (A Child is Born)
• 1973 Se människan (Behold Man)
• 1975 Så blev du till (How You were Made)
• 1982 Vårt inre i närbild (Abbreviated version of Behold Man)
• 1984 Nära Machine)
• 1986 I mammas mage (Being Born)
• 1993 Vi ska få ett syskon (We are Getting a Sibling)
• 2002 Hans livs bilder (Images of His Life)
• 2006 Life

External links

• Profile from Bonniers Förlag.
• Images in Science, a website about the book of that name.
• Biography at the Lennart Nilsson Foundation pages.