"The first lady of the internet," "the patron saint of JPEGs" or "the original sin of tech": The various nicknames attributed to "Lenna" reflect the status that this 50-year-old photo, and the woman featured in it, have acquired in the world of computing. But in recent years, the use of this image has come under fire. So much so that on Wednesday, March 27, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the industry's largest learned society, announced to its members that it would no longer accept manuscripts containing it from April 1.
To understand the story, we need to go back to 1972. That year, Lena Forsén, a 21-year-old Swede, took part in a photo shoot for the US magazine Playboy. A photo was published in the November issue, in which the young woman, staring into the camera, wore only a boa, boots and a feathered hat. She requested that the "N" in her first name be doubled, to prevent Americans from pronouncing it "Lina." This would be her one-and-only appearance in the pages of the erotic magazine.
A few months later, at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles), young computer engineers specializing in image processing were looking for a new photo to use as a test for their research. A copy of Playboy was lying around and the photo of "Lenna" would do. They scanned only part of it, a square showing her face and the top of her shoulder.
The photo was made available to other researchers and became a key figure in computer research. It appeared in countless scientific articles, including those that contributed to the creation of the JPEG format, now widely used. The image is advantageous for test programs due to features such as a human face, various textures and the feather detail. Even as the number of photos available to engineers for their experiments has multiplied into the billions, Forsén's face continues to appear regularly in scientific publications. Her presence has become a tradition, almost a meme.
As for Playboy magazine, which initially threatened to sue anyone using the image without paying royalties, it eventually changed its mind. "We decided we should exploit this, because it is a phenomenon," said Eileen Kent, a magazine executive, in 1997.
A controversial photo
But in the 1990s, a few people criticized the systematic use of this Playboy image as sexist and asked the IEEE to ban it. In an article published in 1996, the editor-in-chief of the journal IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, David C. Munson, refused. He pointed out that "it is a good test image" and said that "it is not surprising that the (mostly male) image processing research community gravitated toward an image they found attractive." However, while he rejected "censorship," he proposed a "compromise" by encouraging engineers to use other photos, so as not to "needlessly upset colleagues."
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