Lennart Olson (Gothenburg, 1925 - Steninge, 2010) was a self-taught artist and the most well known Swedish photographer, who was one of the protagonists of the postwar generation photographers. His images were shown in Sweden and all over the world (MoMA, New York, 1953). He had a solo show at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1989.
Olson studied printmaking at the Royal Swedish Academy in Stockholm, and after World War II, he worked on commercials, specializing in architecture, industry and magazine photography.
After 1955, he became a freelance photographer and was a founding member of the Swedish photographic association »Tio Fotografer« in 1958.
His images of bridges and roads made him world-famous, and he took part in numerous exhibitions with his monumental architectural studies (photomurals). He worked primarily in black-and-white, and since 1978, he used the gum-bichromate printing technique.
In the 1960s Olson worked for some years as a filmmaker, producing more than 50 films including documentaries, theatre plays and musicals for the Swedish Television (among the others: »Flamenco: Encounters with Spanish Gypsies, Samba, Basker, Bonde i Baskerland« (the latter two were produced with Dan Grenholm).