Sven Nykvist was the director of photography on all of Bergman's films and most of his television productions from The Virgin Spring through Fanny and Alexander and After the Rehearsal. So well does Nykvist's cinematography fit Bergman's later films that it is difficult to untangle their mutual influence on each other's work.

Nykvist's pioneering with natural light sources complements Bergman's penchant for location shooting and minimalist shot compositions ("two faces and a teacup"). While Nykvist builds upon the Swedish tradition of filmmaking in his style, he has brought the national tradition of stark psychological landscape into international favour with colour cinematography that achieves iconographical beauty by eschewing the distracting prettiness generally associated with colour film. Initially, Nykvist was reluctant to move from black and white to colour because colour's tendency to prettify subjects and emphasize detail made it difficult to show something as convincingly "ugly." When colour became a commercial necessity, Nykvist and Bergman got off to a false start in All These Woman, released in 1964, which made them run for cover back to black and white until they shot The Passion of Anna in 1969. By ignoring much of the conventional wisdom about using colour film, Nykvist finally managed to bring an iconographical style to Cries and Whispers, his fourth colour film for Bergman.

For decades, foreign cinematographers had little chance of working in American films. The easing of union regulations in the 1970s, however, allowed European directors of photography an increasing visibility in the American film industry. Since then, Nykvist has photographed a variety of American films, and over the years he has worked for other filmmakers, including Louis Malle, Roman Polanski, Andrei Tarkovsky, Volker Schlöndorff, and Woody Allen, and directed his own films.

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