Foetus 18 Weeks: the greatest photograph of the 20th century?
In April 1965, Life magazine put a photograph called Foetus 18 Weeks on its cover and caused a sensation. The issue was a spectacular success, the fastest-selling copy in Life’s entire history. In full colour and crystal clear detail, the picture showed a foetus in its amniotic sac, with its umbilical cord winding off to the placenta. The unborn child, floating in a seemingly cosmic backdrop, appears vulnerable yet serene. Its eyes are closed and its tiny, perfectly formed fists are clutched to its chest.
Capturing that most universal of subjects, our own creation, Foetus 18 Weeks was one of the 20th century’s great photographs, as emotive as it was technically impressive, even by today’s standards. And its impact was enormous, growing into something its creator struggled to control, as the image was hijacked by the fledgling anti-abortion movement.
Foetus 18 Weeks was taken by Lennart Nilsson, part of an astonishing series of prenatal pictures by this visionary Swedish photojournalist. His groundbreaking pictures have now reached a whole new generation, having just been shown at the Paris Photo art fair, the first time they have ever been exhibited outside Sweden. There is talk of a further appearance in Vienna.
Nilsson told the editors of Life his plans to capture the beginnings of human existence while visiting New York in 1954. “It was impossible for us not to express a degree of scepticism about his chances of success,” one later recalled, “but this was lost on Nilsson.” A decade later, he returned with the first photographs, shot in both colour and black and white – an unprecedented feat that fused photography and biological study. They were published in Life as an iconic photo essay, entitled Drama of Life Before Birth.
Ultrasound technology was first introduced for clinical purposes in Glasgow in 1956. But charting an unborn child’s development through such images was not common in hospitals until the 1970s, and even today the quality is poor. So instead, Nilsson enlisted the help of two German endoscope experts, Karl Storz and JungnersOptiska, who created optical tubes with macro lenses and wide-angled optics that could be inserted into a woman’s body.
Nilsson was only able to photograph one living foetus, though, using an endoscopic camera that travelled into a womb. This picture was included in Life and is distinct from the others – being taken inside the uterus means it can’t capture the foetus in its entirety. All the other images were either miscarried or terminated pregnancies.
The photographer worked closely with Professor Axel Ingelman-Sundberg, then head of the women’s clinic at the Sabbatsberg hospital in Stockholm,
taking hundreds of shots with his Hasselblad camera from 1958 to 1965. Whenever the hospital had access to a foetus (or embryo) Nilsson could photograph, they would call him immediately – it was essential to photograph them within a few hours.
Nilsson had set up a studio at the hospital where his subjects would be placed in an aquarium-like environment, which is why they appear to float in space. Together, his shots create a spellbinding timeline, from an egg
fertilised with sperm to foetuses at various stages up to six months.
Nilsson also published the pictures in A Child Is Born, intended as a guide for mothers to be. It is one of the top-selling illustrated books of all time, having been translated into 20 languages. His interest in looking inside bodies to understand the unseen would continue after his foetus series: Nilsson is credited with taking the first photographs of the SARS and HIV viruses. After the rise of television, he turned to moving pictures, making such documentaries as the 1982 Emmyaward winning film The Saga of Life.
Following the huge success of both the Life cover and A Child is Born, Nilsson became world famous. Anne
Fjellström, his stepdaughter, worked as an assistant on a 1990 edition of A Child is Born and became enthralled by his work. “I’ve spent the last 20 years trying to understand it,” says Fjellström, who is now in charge of his estate.
As the women’s liberation movement grew, and debate over reproductive rights raged, Nilsson’s pictures became intensely politicised, especially in the US in the 1970s. But Nilsson was working in Sweden and wasn’t aware of the strong reactions his images were causing abroad. It was only on a trip to London in the 1980s, when Nilsson saw his plagiarised pictures printed on posters at an anti-abortion protest, that he became aware of how they were being used. He was, Fjellström recalls, deeply shocked.
After seeing this, Nilsson refused to allow the photographs to be published again. “Lennart wasn’t a political person,” says Fjellström, though this hasn’t stopped the images being appropriated by anti-abortion campaigners, most recently in Ireland and the US, and the requests keep coming. “I get emails every week,” she says. “But we remain neutral. The material was not made for that purpose and that must be respected.”
However, Nilsson returned to the images shortly before his death in 2017, at the age of 94. He arranged them into a definitive black and white series, so that museums and public collections might be able to access and display them after his death. They were intended to be his legacy. The selection for Paris Photo, which gave the shots an international stage, was put together by Fjellström and Jan Stene, director of Stene Projects, a gallery in Stockholm.
The images caused a stir in Paris and it’s easy to see why: their quiet beauty has a powerful emotional pull. “Nilsson,” says Stene, “wanted to make the invisible visible – and show us the astonishing journey we all make, one that unites all humans. He wanted to give us an opportunity to look inside ourselves, to discover pictures that define us as humankind.”
Nilsson, says Fjellström, was “a very private person” who usually worked alone. How capturing these images might have affected him psychologically remains unclear. “I think he understood that the issue was complicated,” she says. “But like most journalists, he was focused on what he wanted. I know he was amazed by what he saw and wanted to reveal how amazing our common journey is.”
Stene accepts that the images have divided opinion over the polemical question of when life begins, but says: “Everyone interprets images differently, depending on their social, cultural and religious background. In the digital era, I believe it is more important than ever to go back and take a look inside ourselves. What better way of doing that than with these photos?”
Last year, Stene points out, the first ever photograph of a black hole was published. “For me,” he says, “looking at that picture and looking at one of the foetus photos are the same thing. After all, what do we really know about the origin of mankind and the universe?”
milar, then, to that of Sheeran, who – 150m record sales, an estimated £170m fortune and an MBE later – still gives off the air of a mate’s brother just back from a gap year with tales of how sick Goa is. Or, indeed, of Jess Glynne, who’s more glamorous – no record label has yet allowed a female pop artist to take the stage in quite such a dressed-down state as Sheeran or Lewis Capaldi – but still gives off a resolutely ordinary air. At 23, Capaldi is too young to remember a world before social media, and seems like a hybrid of pop artist and social media star: nearly as famous for his extremely funny videos as he is for his music.
Whenever the why-oh-why-ing starts about these artists’ success, it’s usually accompanied by a side-order of hand-wringing about the decline of youth rebellion, citing figures about the rise in youth teetotalism, drawing attention to the disappearance of visually-arresting subcultural youth tribes. A cartoon emerges of parents who grew up in the hedonistic 80s and 90s raising a generation of prissily selfobsessed conformists, interested only in seeing their own lives reflected back at them.
Another way of looking at it would be to note that the last decade has been one of uncertainty and disorder: financial chaos, austerity, political upheaval, division. The future looks less certain still. Perhaps what people want from pop culture isn’t the thrill of the unknown but reassurance and stability. It’s telling that 25, Adele’s multimillionselling followup to 21, offered more of the same – raking over the relationship that had inspired its predecessor, her collaborators having rejected an album full of songs about her life as a new mother. If Ed Sheeran, Lewis Capaldi et al seem like aspirational figures – they’re just like me – they also offer affirmation. Sheeran’s last album, No 6 Collaborations Project, is filled with songs depicting the now rich and famous singer globetrotting, attending swish parties and hanging around with “the beautiful people” while informing his listeners that he feels out of place and would rather be back at home with his partner. Its overall message appears to be: I was happier when I was more like you; be thankful for what you’ve got and careful what you wish for.
If its audience wants reassurance about the future, at least the future of this particular subgenre of pop seems secure. There are more artists waiting in the wings: among the major labels’ priorities for 2020 lurks JC Stewart, a dressed-down acoustic guitartoting Irish singer-songwriter who cowrote Capaldi’s song Hollywood. If the music industry seems loth to let female pop stars be as visually unremarkable as their male counterparts, then outside of it – in the bedroom pop that’s huge with teens and tweens, its hits propagated not by radio play, but by viral videos and TikTok crazes – lurk female artists who aren’t bound by their rules: just watch Beach Bunny’s Prom Queen, a massive social media hit in 2019 thanks to TikTok. At least one area of pop appears to be intent on going back to normal, over and over again.
Talent shows ensured that it was no longer a good thing to be remote or aloof or mysterious