In her new e book, How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex: An Unexpected History, Samantha Cole traces the twisting historical past of the “Lena Centerfold,” a picture from Playboy that grew to become a world customary for coaching computer systems to acknowledge pictures. The picture, taken in 1972, persevered for many years in laptop science, even inspiring op-eds in 2015 from engineering college students. The picture and its ubiquity got here to represent sexism and male domination for a lot of younger ladies coming into the sector.

And as for the lady herself, Lena? Read on to see how she grew to become a stranger to her personal picture.

In 1972, Lena Sjööblom took a modeling gig with Playboy, posed for a nude photograph, acquired the paycheck, and moved on along with her life.

It was the primary and final time Lena posed nude. She turned down a private invitation from Hugh Hefner to go to his mansion. She took extra gigs with Kodak, posing for “Shirley Cards” (named for the primary mannequin to pose for one, a white, brunette Kodak worker named Shirley Page) that helped technicians calibrate the lighting and colour balances on movie. Her associates thought the Playboy anecdote was a enjoyable little bit of trivia, however for Lena that photograph was up to now.

But for the remainder of the world, Lena was altering the web.

A couple of months after that concern of Playboy hit stands, on the University of Southern California’s Signal and Image Processing Institute, electrical engineer Alexander Sawchuk and his group have been engaged on image-processing algorithms for computer systems. They used “test images”—a particular set of pictures shared throughout imaging labs, so that every lab was working from the identical customary—to place their picture compression algorithms via their paces. The group’s work would ultimately contribute to the event of the JPEG file format, one of the crucial frequent picture codecs we nonetheless use right now.

None of the historic retellings of Lena’s story appears to incorporate (or needs to disclose) who, precisely, introduced the Playboy to work that day. But most accounts agree that once they wanted a brand new picture to scan right into a Hewlett-Packard 2100 minicomputer, the November 1972 concern of Playboy was chosen for comfort. They have been tired of the outdated check pictures and needed a photograph with a human face, fascinating textures, and a shiny end to check the bounds of the expertise. The centerfold was excellent.

They reduce Lena’s photograph out of the journal from her shoulders up, successfully making the photograph protected for work. Some have attributed the crop job to style or tact; extra possible, it was a technical matter. The prime 5.12 inches of the web page match into the Muirhead wirephoto scanner, making a 512 x 512 pixel picture.

The picture suited their functions so nicely, they gave the scans to different researchers engaged on comparable picture processing duties, and it will definitely traveled so extensively that it was accepted as a regular throughout the trade. There have been different check pictures in use on the time, however Lena grew to become the established customary that labs across the nation might agree on. Part of her enduring legacy is propelled by controversy. Over the course of 20 years, Lena’s picture unfold quietly and uncontrollably earlier than Playboy even seen. By the time the writer did discover, when the commerce journal Optical Engineering put Lena on its July cowl in 1991, it was too late for them to attempt to reel her again in—the writer gave permission for academic and analysis functions as a substitute.

But copyright violation wasn’t the trigger for competition. With the tech world’s dot-com explosion providing promising futures for all on the similar time, ladies have been world-building, moderating, and internet hosting BBS servers, MUDs, and their very own web sites proper there with the outdated boys’ membership. But ladies nonetheless weren’t seen as equal rivals and colleagues with their male counterparts within the computing workforce. The Lena check picture, some argued, was simply one other artifact of the carelessly patriarchal pondering that had dominated the final thirty years. Some demanded the picture be retired.

Editor-in-chief of trade journal IEEE Transactions on Image Processing David Munson Jr. wrote an open letter addressing these complaints in 1996. His verdict was to not censor makes use of of Lena, but when there have been different, equally helpful choices obtainable, researchers ought to go for these as a substitute. “In cases where another image will serve your purpose equally well, why not use that other image?” Munson wrote. The concern appeared settled.

For years, Lena herself had no concept any of this was occurring. She was dwelling quietly in Sweden, unaware of the ruckus her photoshoot had stirred amongst laptop geeks within the US. It wasn’t till she was invited to the Fiftieth Annual Conference of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology in 1997 that she understood the scope at which her picture was getting used, not to mention because the gold customary for greater than twenty years. She’d by no means even accessed the web till then.

The convention was a surreal expertise for Lena, primarily as a result of all these individuals, largely white male engineers, had by no means thought of her actual, bodily existence earlier than. They have been assembly the Weird Science girl of their academia days, a set of pixels and colours they’d studied carefully however by no means noticed as half of a complete human.

The attitudes of experimentation on ladies’s our bodies and pictures push ladies out of the trade earlier than they’ve an opportunity to start out. In 2015, Maddie Zug, a senior on the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, wrote an op-ed to the Washington Post about her expertise as certainly one of a handful of feminine friends assigned to make use of the Lena picture for a coding challenge. The trainer warned them to not search for the picture. Of course, the very first thing everybody in that laptop lab did was seek for the unique and pull up the entire centerfold on their screens.

“At the time I was 16 and struggling to believe that I belonged in a male-dominated computer science class,” Zug wrote. “I tried to tune out the boys’ sexual comments. Why is an advanced science, technology, engineering and mathematics school using a Playboy centerfold in its classrooms?”

Today, feminine expertise college students nonetheless have lots of the similar complaints as they’ve from the start: Gender wage gaps, male-skewed development alternatives, and sexist attitudes nonetheless thrive in tech. Having to sit down via a computing class the place a narrative a few huddle of males and their unaware Playmate is the week’s lesson is salt within the wound.

Though now in her seventies and a grandmother, Lena appears to carry few sturdy opinions on using her picture. Though the check picture nonetheless haunts our fashionable machines, like a nostalgic nod, present picture processing researchers often use her of their papers. But lately, a number of journals and establishments introduced they’d outright ban submissions that featured Lena, together with the Optical Society, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the whole household of round 150 Nature journals.

For some within the picture processing world, Lena has merely outlasted her usefulness. In his 2018 farewell letter as editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions, Scott Acton urged his colleagues to suppose exterior the outdated standbys. The Lena crop accommodates round 260,000 pixels—fairly good for her time. An picture from the iPhone 11, launched in 2019, accommodates greater than 12,000,000.

Five years after Lena’s Miss November concern, the Apple II would develop into the primary graphics-capable private laptop to enter American houses. Before picture processing reached the lots, nevertheless, individuals made do with what they’d: textual content, assembled into mosaic.

Adapted from How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex: An Unexpected History by Samantha Cole. Workman © 2022