Best known for his three-decade collaboration with Ingmar Bergman, which produced several of the most important films of the modern cinema, the legendary cinematographer Sven Nykvist has had a unique impact on the film medium. He revitalized Bergman’s films in the late 1950s and 1960s by replacing the high-contrast lighting and overblown chiaroscuro imagery that had long defined the “Art” in art cinema with a purer, more ascetic approach (the “pencil sketch”). Nykvist’s new economy of visual means gave these films greater facility to capture the spare landscapes under Nordic light and to probe the souls of Bergman’s characters. Nykvist would go on in the 1970s and 1980s to work with a no less stellar array of filmmakers, often collaborating on major projects at key moments in their careers: Louis Malle on his first American film, Andrei Tarkovsky with his final film, Woody Allen with his return to drama. In the 1990s Nykvist continued to challenge himself, directing his own feature film while assisting Liv Ullmann in her successful transition from actor to director. A lifetime spent in the company of light has made him a consummate craftsman and one of the greatest cinematographers in the history of the medium.