The photographer Lennart Nilsson with a special lens. Credit Bettmann
Lennart Nilsson, an innovative Swedish photographer whose micro-cameras bared some of life’s previously impenetrable and breathtaking moments — most memorably a human embryo’s maturation from the instant a sperm cell fertilizes an egg — died on Saturday in Stockholm. He was 94.
His death was confirmed by his stepdaughter, Anne Fjellstrom.
Mr. Nilsson fused artistic and scientific virtuosity to blaze a new frontier in photography, especially within the womb. He transformed himself into a daring explorer, leading viewers of his images — in books, magazines and television documentaries — on fascinating journeys deep inside the human body.
To do so he incorporated electron microscopy, endoscopic fiber optics and custom lenses.
“I’m just a photographer who happened to be fascinated with mankind,” he said on his website.
In one book, “Behold Man: A Photographic Journey of Discovery Inside the Body,” he collaborated with Jan Lindberg, a pathologist, to depict and describe the body’s interior landscape.
In these photos, stomach glands resemble a volcanic moonscape. Calcium crystals in the inner ear look like a boulder-strewn panorama. Blood cells enlarged 20,000 times loom like imposing doughnuts. (A person magnified that much would be 22 miles tall.)
For other projects his micro-cameras exposed cerebral hemorrhages, the virus that causes AIDS, and tar-laden smokers’ lungs to the naked eye.
His first collection, tracing the development of an embryo, was perhaps the most celebrated, appearing in Life magazine in 1965 under the title “The Drama of Life Before Birth” and published in expanded book form as “A Child Is Born.”
Using high-definition, three-dimensional ultrasound; a scanning electron microscope; advanced fiber optics; color filters to tint the photographic gray scale; and wide-angle lenses, Mr. Nilsson documented the journey to conception by some two million sperm as they swam six inches upstream from a woman’s cervix to the eggs traveling down her fallopian tubes.
In other instances he recorded human reproduction through the processes of amniocentesis, in vitro fertilization, ectopic pregnancies (when the embryo develops outside the uterus) and miscarriages.
“I am driven by a desire to illustrate vital processes that concern us all to the highest degree yet are invisible — to make them visible,” he said. “Such processes can take place inside the human body or in the life that exists on earth. I want to educate people and also increase their reverence for life.”
Unwittingly or not, that reverence had political ramifications. His photographs of fetuses as early as 19 weeks old, with features clearly defined, provided ammunition for the anti-abortion movement, which circulated his photos.
Lennart Nilsson’s photographs tracing an embryo’s development were featured in a celebrated 1965 spread in Life magazine. A fetus with placenta at 11 to 12 weeks. Credit Lennart Nilsson/TT 1 of 4 Go to previous slide Go to next slide
Each technical innovation he developed led to more sophisticated photography and more vivid documentaries, from “The Miracle of Life” in 1984, produced with Bob Erikson, to “Odyssey of Life,” which was shown on the PBS program “Nova” in 1996. His films won three Emmy Awards.
Lars Olof Lennart Nilsson was born on Aug. 24, 1922, to the former Karin Linden and Nils Georg Nilsson, a railway worker and photographer, in Strangnas, Sweden, just west of Stockholm.
In addition to his stepdaughter, he is survived by his second wife, Catharina Tjornedal; a stepson, Thomas Fjellstrom; and three grandchildren. A son, Kjell, from his first marriage, to Birgit Svensson, died in 2013. Ms. Svensson died in 1986.
Lennart began collecting flora when he was 5 and got his first camera when he was 11.
“I remember very well the first pictures I took of laburnum,” he recalled, referring to the small trees with yellow pea flowers. “And even then I thought it would be exciting to see how laburnum looked inside.”
At 15, after seeing a documentary film about Louis Pasteur, he began taking microphotographs of bugs.
He began his freelance career covering the liberation of Nazi-occupied Norway in the last days of World War II. After the war he produced photo essays on a polar bear hunt and on a midwife who delivered 1,500 children in the Swedish mountains, as well as portraits of famous Swedes.
He turned to microphotography after becoming fascinated by a fetus in a glass jar at Sabbatsbergs Hospital in Stockholm. Life published his first picture of an embryo in 1953. His 1965 photo spread in the magazine on embryonic development took more than a decade to complete.
“Ten years ago a Swedish photographer, Lennart Nilsson, told us that he was going to photograph in color the stages of human reproduction from fertilization to just before birth,” George P. Hunt, Life’s managing editor, wrote in 1965.
“It was impossible for us not to express a degree of skepticism about his chances of success, but this was lost on Nilsson,” Mr. Hunt wrote. “He simply said, ‘When I’ve finished the story, I’ll bring it to you.’ Lennart kept his promise.”
Mr. Nilsson saw his role as that of “an important messenger between the scientific world and the public” in work that demanded the conscientiousness of a scientist coupled with the patience and temperament of an artist.
But as an artist who also photographed decomposing organisms, bloodthirsty mosquitoes penetrating human skin, fatty deposits clogging arteries and bacteria-filled bowels, he faced a special challenge in finding human models.
When he asked the Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson (no relation) for permission to photograph her vocal cords for “Odyssey of Life,” she agreed, but not without some initial hesitation.
