Lennart Nilsson
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"Foster, 18 veckor", 1965.
From "Ett barn blir till". Signed Lennart Nilsson and numbered 3/25 verso. Printed 2015. Platinum palladium print, image 44.5 x 44.5 cm.
Literature
Life Magazine, 30 april 1965, illustrated on cover.
Lennart Nilsson, Axel Ingelman-Sundberg and Claes Wirsén, ”Ett barn blir till”, 1965, illustrated on spread p. 116-117.
More information
Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson (1922-2017) is world famous.
He was the first in history to photograph a human foetus inside the womb. Nilsson’s experiments with electron microscopes and endoscopes, combined with further techniques, gave him the possibility to create images of the development of life. The project was begun in 1953 and took Nilsson twelve years to complete.
Lennart Nilsson’s A Child is Born represented a major breakthrough in medical photography. In 1965 American LIFE Magazine published his 16-page feature ‘The Drama of Life Before Birth’. Together with the issues about the assassination of John F. Kennedy (1963) and ‘the Moon Landing’ (1969) it is the magazine’s fastest selling issue ever.
His book A Child is Born was first published in 1965 and is today one of the world’s most sold book of photography. It has sold more than 30 million copies, been published in five editions and translated into at least twenty languages. That same year he was awarded the Photographer of the Year Award by the American Society of Magazine Photographers. The images have been shown in exhibitions across the world and could, for example, be viewed at Abecita Popkonst & Foto in Borås during the spring of 2016 and at Westlicht. Schauplatz für Fotografie in Vienna in the spring of 2020.
At the same time as becoming one of the most successful feature photographers in the world Nilsson also had an equally successful career as a science photographer. He collaborated with Gillis Häägg (1931-2015) on many of his large projects. Häägg was a pioneer of colour photography in Europe and known as the man who coloured Lennart Nilsson’s scientific photographs.
The two men had a close professional relationship that lasted for almost forty years.
In 1980 Nilsson was awarded the Hasselblad Prize. He is represented in several of the world’s biggest and most important museums, including the British Museum in London, Tokyo Fuji Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as Nationalmuseum and Moderna Museet, both in Stockholm.