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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 image would come to be known — through a converter. It worked. The lab passed out copies of their successfully compressed image to visitors, which other programmers then used to test their own algorithms and compare with others’ results.
The Lena image was an ideal test case for image-processing algorithms, with rich contrasts, color, and details anchored by the familiar contours of a human face. Other images possessed those same qualities, but this one appealed to the predominantly male image-processing sector. Wavelets, compression, reconstruction, denoising: Whatever the technology, Lena was used to test it. Download one of the many free-use copies of Lena available on the internet, and you get a JPEG — a format developed with the use of Lena.
Even as the technology and the engineers working with it aged and changed, the Lena image did not. It persisted in labs as if it were an inalterable part of the furniture and not the result of…
