The New Year Quote by Lennart Nilsson

You can hear the old-school craftsman meeting the new machine and deciding, pragmatically, to join it. Lennart Nilsson, famous for making the invisible intimate, isn t romanticizing computers here; he s staking a claim. The repetition "computers, computers, computers" reads like both awe and mild exasperation, a rhythmic shrug that admits where power has moved. In a medium built on light, chemistry, and patience, he s acknowledging that the decisive tool is now computation: image processing, reconstruction, and the kind of resolution that turns a cell from an abstraction into something with texture, stakes, and narrative.

The intent is managerial as much as artistic: keep the cell alive, extract new information, hit "high resolution". Nilsson frames technology not as a shiny add-on but as an ethical and technical requirement. "Have the cell survive" hints at the biomedical reality behind the poetry - you don t get better pictures by bullying life into stillness. The subtext is a quiet negotiation between spectacle and responsibility, between the photographer s hunger to see and the subject s fragility.

That timeline "five years" to "reached the target" is telling. It positions innovation as sustained labor, not a eureka moment, and it marks Nilsson as someone treating photography like research. Coming from a photographer who helped define fetal and microscopic imagery for the public, the line doubles as cultural commentary: the next era of truth in images won t be won in the darkroom, but in code.