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In 1972, Playboy named Lenna Sjööblom as Miss November, a Swedish model who had moved to Chicago just a few years before. Lenna, whose real name is Lena Forsén, had a pretty typical run as Playmate of the Month. Her pictorial was spread across five pages of the magazine’s November issue, plus a full-color centerfold of Forsén wearing just a sun hat, pink feather boa, and sheer stockings with boots.
But what’s not so typical is that Forsén’s centerfold went down in internet history, earning her the title of “First Lady of the Internet” and forming the building blocks for the modern-day JPEG.
How is it that a Playboy model became queen of the internet? It was an instance of being in the right place at the right time, and in this case, Forsén was in the pages of Playboy when the magazine landed in the hands of Alexander Sawchuk at the University of Southern California’s Signal and Image Processing Institute, according to Wired. Sawchuk was looking for an image to test with his new compression algorithm—a way to reduce the size of a digital file so it’s manageable, but without compromising its appearance. Sick of using standard television test images, Sawchuk came across Forsén’s issue of Playboy, landing on her centerfold as the perfect test for his project. Sawchuk only used the top third of the centerfold, showing Forsén’s shoulders and above. (This was for science, after all.) The image centers the human face, and contains fine details in her hair and in her feathered hat—all a perfect test case for digital imaging.
Sawchuck digitized the image and used his algorithm to compress it—and it was a success. It did so well that the research eventually led to the creation of the JPEG, “the image standard that revolutionized the way digital images are seen, taken, and shared,” according to the Society of Women Engineers Magazine.
“Forsén’s cropped photo has appeared in tens of thousands of journal articles, research papers, books, and educational resources on image processing,” Seabright McCabe wrote for the Society of Women Engineers Magazine. “For decades, it has been the most widely used test image on Earth.”
It’s been said that Forsén is to computer engineers what Rita Hayworth was to World War II soldiers, achieving widespread fame and record sales for both Miss November and the magazine. And in 2019, 47 years after a 21-year-old Forsén appeared in Playboy, she told Wired that her fame was still going strong.
“I’m just surprised that it never ends,” said Forsén, then 67.“When I was in Quebec, this girl came up to me and she said, ‘I think I know every freckle on your face. She was like, ‘Oh, you’re real. You’re a person.’ It was crazy.”
Her image endures, but in 2024, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) banned the use of Forsén as a test image in academic articles, marking the end of a digital era. According to the professional technology organization, the move was to promote a culture of inclusion and “with respect to the wishes of the subject of the image.”
For years, women in particular had argued that using a photo of a playmate as the standard test image contributed to women’s subjugation in science and tech fields. In the article for the Society of Women Engineers Magazine, McCabe continued: “But [Forsén’s image] also underscores how women have been pushed out of the digital world, what author Emily Chang, in her book, Brotopia, calls ‘tech’s original sin, and the first step in women’s exclusion from Silicon Valley.’”
“Using an image of an attractive woman sends a message that women are ‘the pretty picture’ and not the ones doing the coding or the algorithms, said Deanna Needell, Ph.D., professor of mathematics at UCLA,” McCabe wrote. “She noted that it reinforces the false perception that tech innovation is a fundamentally male pursuit.”
The IEEE wasn’t the first to ban Forsén as a test image. In 2018, the scientific journal Nature did so because “the history of the Lena image clashes with the extensive efforts to promote women undertaking higher education in science and engineering. And in 2019, the same year that Forsén recreated her iconic image for Wired, she also called for her image to be retired.
“I retired from modelling a long time ago,” Forsén, who now lives in Sweden, said in a documentary called “Losing Lena.” “It’s time I retired from tech, too. We can make a simple change today that creates a lasting change for tomorrow. Let’s commit to losing me.”