Inge Pål-Nils Nilsson (July 7, 1929 – May 25, 2002),[1] was a Swedish photographer and filmmaker active from the 1950s to the 1990s.
Pål-Nils Nilsson was the son of sculptor Robert Nilsson (1894–1984) and celebrated textile artist Barbro Nilsson (1899–1983).[2] After their marriage in 1928 the couple went abroad on a three-year artist scholarship, living mainly in Rome, where their son Pål-Nils Nilsson was born in 1929. Back in Sweden, the family lived in Stockholm. Summers were spent in Lerberget in the south of Höganäs, Robert Nilsson's home region.
Nilsson started as an advertising photographer and with Sten Didrik Bellander (1921–2001), Harry Dittmar, Sven Gillsäter (1921–2001), Rune Hassner(1928–2003), Hans Malmberg (1927–1977), Georg Oddner(1923–2007), and Lennart Olson (1925–2010), Hans Hammarskiöld (1925–2012), Tore Johnson, and Hans Malmberg was a member of the professional collective Tio Fotografer ('Ten photographers') formed in 1958 and their subsequent photo agency Tiofoto.The group was influential in Swedish photography especially because among its members, Pål-Nils Nilsson, Hans Hammarskiöld, Rune Hassner, Georg Oddner and Lennart Olson held prominent positions in the educational and institutional spheres and they regularly exhibited at significant venues for photography, and the whole group was presented at the Hasselblad Centre in 1998, the year Nilsson became a professor of photography at the Fothögskolan in Gothenburg.
In particular, Pål-Nils Nilsson has become famous for photos of Swedish landscapes and cultural environments and for his films for television. From 1955 for 30 years he illustrated the Swedish Tourist Association's annual journals and other books. He worked on stories that promoted the interests of the minority group, the Laplander Sami.[3] His photographs of the reindeer round-up in Sweden were featured in The Times in 1965.[4]
Edward Steichen included Nilsson in the world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man that was seen by 9 million visitors; it is a slow-shutter picture of a rapt young girl listening to a pianist amidst the swirling throng of an adult party.[5] Nilsson was included in two other MoMA exhibitions; Postwar European Photography, May 26 – August 23, 1953, and Photographs from the Museum Collection, November 26, 1958 – January 18, 1959.[6]
In 1954, at age 24, Nilsson married photographer Ingegärd Nanny Kristina Nilsson (1931–2002) who was born in Göteborg, and they had two children. They divorced in 1973.