Getting physical images to be transformed into digital content took years of reasoning, testing and research, which among other things led to the spread of the digital compression and processing standard known as JPEG. The story of how this standard was born is strangely linked to a photograph taken in 1972 of Swedish model Lena Forsén, published on the center page of the adult magazine Playboy. Due to certain technical characteristics of that image, and also because someone found it funny, the photo was used for some tests and thus entered in its own way the story of how the images were digitized. And, by extension, in the history of the internet.
Many, even without knowing it, have encountered on some screens the digitized gaze of Lena, who is very well known in some niches of internet and digital enthusiasts and professionals: Wired spoke of her as the “patron saint of JPEGs” , someone said that “for certain digital engineers she was what Rita Hayworth was for American soldiers during the Second World War” and someone else even called her “the first woman of the internet”.
All this happened without Forsén's knowledge for a long time. When they told her, she seemed happy at first, but it seems she changed her mind later.
Forsén's photo was published in Playboy in November 1972. Her last name at the time was Söderberg, and she was Playboy's model of the month: in the photo she was turned three-quarters and wore nothing but a hat, boots, fishnets and pink boa. She was 21 and was introduced as Lenna Sjööblom. He had chosen to change his surname and have an “n” added to his name to help English-speaking readers pronounce it correctly. That was her only Playboy photo and her only nude.
A few months later, that issue of Playboy ended up in the hands and under the eyes of some engineers and researchers at the University of Southern California, who cut out the photo of Lena from the shoulders up and used it as a photograph of a human face on which to test. an algorithm for image compression. In fact, due to its colors and its structure, the photo respected some certain characteristics (just as, in reality, many other similar photos, female or male, would have respected them).
The photo of Lena's face was then scanned and converted into a series of digital information capable of reproducing a new digital version on the screen. As a recent article in The Pudding wrote, from then on «the history of the image accompanied the history of the internet and Lena was one of the first faces of ARPANET, the predecessor of the internet, and then of the world wide web».
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Already in 1973 the image reached a certain fame, to the point that in the film The Sleepyhead by Woody Allen (in which he plays a man who wakes up in 2173 after 200 years of hibernation) is shown – whole – as an “artifact” of the twentieth century , together with, among others, photos of Iosif Stalin, Richard Nixon, Charles De Gaulle and Francis Scott Fitzgerald.
However, since in the 1970s and 1980s the internet was a thing for a few, Lena's image also circulated mostly in specific niches. In 1991, for example, his digitized image was placed, along with some others significant in their own way for digital history, on the cover of the academic journal Optical Engineering.
It's unclear how, but that cover was reported to Playboy, who threatened a lawsuit for unauthorized use of the image. Except that many IT professionals had become fond of us and protested, and in the end Playboy did not sue: perhaps fearing the terrible consequences of image, or perhaps because he had even intuited that the benefits linked to the circulation of that image they could have been much greater than the small financial compensation that could have been obtained with the lawsuit.
Certainly, as The Pudding wrote, the lawsuit made a notable contribution to “making Lena's image a canon in engineering folklore” and, more generally, of the entire internet. As it grew, link after link and copy after copy, the internet also brought Lena's image into it: as a meme, as a joking reference among insiders and as an object of illustration, exercises, lectures and academic articles.
Meanwhile, Forsén had modeled for Kodak, posing in front of cameras to help the company calibrate film colors and working in an all-female group known as “Shirleys”, named after the first of them: Shirley. Page. Then, after work of a completely different kind, she returned to live in Sweden. She was already there in 1997, when she was invited to attend a meeting at the 50th annual conference of the Society for Imaging Science in Technology, interested in celebrating the history of digital imaging.
In the article titled “Playmate Meets the Geeks Who Made Her a Net Star”, Wired wrote: “For 25 years she has graced the desktops of millions of engineers, researchers and digital imaging specialists, and now she meets her fans “. She, who had recently learned of his peculiar fame, said: “They must be so tired of me, after looking at the same picture all these years.” The article added that Forsén used computers (among other things in some of her activities with disabled people) but was not familiar with the internet, and described her as “signing autographs and having her photograph taken”.
At least one other time, in 2015, Forsén attended a similar event (and there is a photo of her on that occasion, in front of a blow-up of her photo from 1972). In 2019 she was then again tracked down, interviewed and photographed for a new Wired article: at 67, she posed for a new version – from the shoulders up – of her most famous photo. The article said that Forsén had a large watch at home that had been given to her at the 1997 conference and that he celebrated her as “the first woman of the internet” and then continued as follows: “Lena does not bear any grudge towards those who have appropriated the her image, she only regrets not having gained anything ». “I'm really proud of that photo”, she said: “one day a girl came to me and said 'I seem to know every part of your face'”.
In 2019, however, the documentary Losing Lena was also released, very critical of the use that was made of that image of her over the decades. In the documentary trailer, Forsén is shown after many other people talking about her, and says: “I have long since retired from the modeling career, it is time for me to be withdrawn from technology as well.” The documentary asks, in short, that we stop using on the internet – now as if it were a meme – the image derived from the photograph taken in Forsén almost half a century ago.
It is also the position of The Pudding, which among other things has reconstructed how and how much the image has spread over the decades. The article also notes that, after the documentary, a part of the academic world chose not to use it anymore, even if this proposal had already been made previously (for example in a 2015 opinion article published by the Washington Post) and someone had already followed her.
The Pudding talks about the image of Forsén (which it refers to as “the image of Lenna”, following the name with which it is famous on the internet) associating it with an archetypal form of a still very contemporary problem, relating to a historical moment in which «sharing content is easier than ever» and in which «digital culture is by definition collective». A moment and a context in which «pieces of digital culture are saved, screenshots and reposted for years», in which, however, the fact that «we have so little control over the use and abuse of certain things» is jarring. The article also mentions the possible problematic nature of the use and abuse of a female image, taken from a magazine for adults, in a context with a mostly male history such as that of computer engineering.
