Finding Lena, the Patron Saint of JPEGs
Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs
For almost as long as the Lenna has been idolized among computer scientists, however, it has also been a source of controversy. “I have heard feminists argue that the image should be retired,” David C. Munson Jr., current president of the Rochester Institute of Technology, wrote back in 1996. Yet, 19 years later, the Lenna remained so ubiquitous that Maddie Zug, a high school senior from Virginia, felt compelled to write an op-ed about it in The Washington Post. The image, she explained, had elicited “sexual comments” from the boys in her class, and its continuing inclusion in the curriculum was evidence of a broader “culture issue.”Deanna Needell, a math professor at UCLA, had similar memories from college, so in 2013 she and a colleague staged a quiet protest: They acquired the rights to a head shot of the male model Fabio Lanzoni and used that for their imaging research instead. But perhaps the most stringent critic of the image is Emily Chang, author of Brotopia. “The prolific use of Lena’s photo can be seen as a harbinger of behavior within the tech industry,” she writes in the book’s opening chapter. “In Silicon Valley today, women are second-class citizens and most men are blind to it.” For Chang, the moment that Lena’s centerfold was torn and scanned marked “tech’s original sin.”One voice that has been conspicuously missing from the Lenna debate is that of Lena herself. The first and last time she spoke with the American press was in 1997, at the same conference where she was given her beloved mantel clock. (WIRED ran a short article on the visit titled “Playmate Meets Geeks Who Made Her a Net Star.”)Jeff Seideman, a former chapter president of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, recalls that Lena’s presence at the conference caused a stir among his colleagues. “As silly as it sounds, they were surprised she was a real person,” he told me. “After some of them had spent 25 years looking at her picture, she just became this test image.” Since then, as the internet has grown to encompass billions of users and trillions of photos, no one has bothered to ask her what she makes of her image and its controversial afterlife.“I’m just surprised that it never ends,” Forsen says about her unusual fame.
Anna HuixI started looking for Lena about a year ago. For a first lady, she was remarkably difficult to find. After a series of fruitless searches, I discovered that the last time she’d appeared in public was in 2015, as a “special guest” at an image processing industry conference in Quebec City. Photographs of the event showed her stepping onstage through a glistening projection of her younger self. I reached out to the conference organizers, who said that they no longer had her contact information and that the man who had orchestrated her visit had died. Finally, the chair of the conference, an academic named Jean-Luc Dugelay, agreed to put us in touch. He cautioned, though, that Lena might well decline. “She is now apart from all of that,” he wrote.That's how, on a sweltering summer day in Stockholm, the object of tech’s original sin, the apple to Sawchuk’s Eve, came walking toward me. She’d told me to meet her on the Stureplan, a busy central square in one of the capital’s tonier districts. I waited under a large mushroom-shaped public sculpture, which provided much-needed shade. On a building nearby, a digital billboard flashed an ad for the Samsung S9+, showcasing its crisp camera.Soon, two older women emerged from a side street. Lena had brought a friend along, presumably to make sure I was a safe interlocutor. She wore a black and white printed sundress and pink Birkenstocks. Her gray hair was cropped close at the sides and crescendoed into graceful spikes, and her brightly manicured nails matched her shoes. “I am Lena,” she said, extending her hand. “How can I help you?” Together, we made our way into an upscale mall nearby and settled into a quiet corner in its posh café. Lena ordered a hot coffee, wiped her glasses, and began to tell me her story.We started from the beginning. After finishing high school, Lena had moved to the US to work as an au pair for one of her relatives. She’d planned to stay a year, but that turned into eight. By 1971, she was living in Chicago, newly married and trying to make ends meet. Her husband at the time encouraged her to sign up with a local modeling agency. “I was too short to do a lot of clothes, but I did some jewelry and some catalogs, and then I got in contact with Playboy,” she said. “They wanted my mouth for a cover.” She was introduced to a photographer named Dwight Hooker, who asked whether she might be interested in some “Playboy pictures.” “I didn’t really know what that was,” she told me. “But my husband, he thought it was kind of cool, and it was money, and I didn’t have a lot of money.”