Gunnar Fischer was the director of photography on the films that first brought Ingmar Bergman worldwide renown. Like most Swedish cinematographers, he is a master of practical lighting and operates his own camera. His style is heavily influenced both by the facial landscapes of Carl Dreyer, for whom he worked, and by the psychological landscapes of Victor Sjöström, whom he knew. Fischer is thus in the mainstream of the Scandinavian tradition. His work features some of the closest and most intensely psychological close-ups and two-shots in film history. He favours a cold, bleak lighting that lends many of Bergman's early films a sense of despair the director may not have intended. In Fischer's films, one is constantly in a world governed by a changeable moral atmosphere which is signified by variations in light, from harshly overexposed noontimes to backlit twilights.

His early films for Bergman have a misleading flavour of Italian neorealism, not surprising given their period, but as the emphasis of Bergman's films is on moral conflict so the cinematography's harshness indicates a psychological or emotional rather than social barrenness. The pseudo-neorealist harshness of the 1940s gives way to the symbolic dreamscape of the 1950s in Wild Strawberries. Here the shift from past to present, from memory to actuality to dream, is signified largely by changes in light: a soft-focus, bright light for the past, a darker light for the present, an overexposed world or an intensely dark one filled with fearfully sharp contrasts and huge faces for dreams.

Fischer and Bergman parted company after The Devil's Eye. Bergman's style was mellowing, and he was gaining more technical expertise and authority. When he could not persuade Fischer to soften his lighting techniques, Bergman switched to Sven Nykvist as his director of photography. Since Fischer's retirement in 1975, he has lectured on film lighting at various Scandinavian universities.

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