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A Nude ‘Playboy’ Photo Has Been a Mainstay in Testing Tech for Decades
The documentary ‘Losing Lena’ is about the many small ways in which women are told they don’t belong in tech
In 1972, a Swedish woman named Lena Söderberg accepted a modeling job from the photographer Dwight Hooker. Söderberg was 21, new to the United States, and broke. The name of Hooker’s employer, Playboy, didn’t mean much to her; the contract definitely did. “It was money, and I didn’t have a lot of money,” she explained to Wired earlier this year.
In the photo shoot’s most famous image, a hat-wearing Söderberg stands nude before a full-length mirror, clutching a feather boa and looking over one shoulder. The photograph ran as the centerfold in the November 1972 issue. Then she moved on with her life.
The following year, a team of engineers at the University of Southern California’s Signal and Image Processing Institute were looking for an image on which to test a new piece of image-compression software. A man in the lab — they were all men — offered his copy of Playboy, because it was the 1970s and bringing a Playboy to work was an okay thing to do.
A colleague ripped out the photograph from the shoulders up and ran the now-PG-rated image of Miss November — or Lena, as the…
