War & Peace Quote by Lennart Nilsson

Nilsson frames the lab not as a temple of pristine control but as a battlefield where the villain is embarrassingly mundane: light. It is a photographer's heresy and a photographer's truth. In scientific imaging, illumination is never neutral; it is heat, radiation, disturbance. The brighter you make a scene, the more you risk changing the very life you claim to document. By calling light "our real enemy", he flips the usual anxiety of sterility into a more revealing fear: not contamination of the specimen, but contamination of the image by the act of seeing.

The line also smuggles in a quiet ethos of restraint. "Very very poor lighting" isn't a complaint so much as a moral constraint: the subject (often fetal life, in Nilsson's case) is fragile, and the photographer has to accept a kind of visual humility. You're not staging; you're negotiating. That repetition, "very very", sounds like the weary emphasis of someone who has tried every trick and learned where bravado fails.

Then comes the pivot: "But we can increase the light with computers". It's not sci-fi optimism; it's a practical manifesto for the late-20th-century shift from chemical photography to computational imaging. Instead of blasting more photons onto a living subject, you amplify signal after the fact: longer exposures, stacking, noise reduction, contrast enhancement. The subtext is that technology can make looking less violent. Nilsson is defending a new pact between aesthetics and ethics: let the computer do the brightening so the body doesn't have to pay for it.