A Playboy photo from 1972 has been banned by a famous scientific community

In 1972 Alexander Sawchuka professor at the University of California, started the magazine Playboy and he lost his head for the model who occupied the famous “centerfold” of the famous magazine for adults.

Lena Forsén she was naked and wearing only a hat with purple feathers, fishnet stockings and boots. Photographed from behind, the model had her face turned towards the camera.

Sawchuk had admired that image without any malice. In the professor’s mind, the Swedish model he had before his eyes was perfect. But for reasons that they had nothing to do with physical appearance.

The richness of the details and the right mix of lights and shadows made that Playboy photo an ideal tool for carrying out the first tests of the algorithms for image compression.

Sawchuk slipped the magazine into the scanner and archived only the most chaste part of the centerfold, namely a 512×512 pixel square portion that included the model’s bare shoulder, her face and her hat.

From that moment on, every researcher engaged in the study and development of digital images has encountered, at least once in his life, Lena Forsén’s gaze.

The square photo with the model’s face was in fact used and cited in numerous scientific papers published from the Seventies to the Nineties, so much so that it attracted the attention of Playboy itselfwho initially intended to claim the rights to the shot and ultimately turned a blind eye in the name of progress instead.

Studies on image processing at the University of California, in fact, have led to two of the most used standards in image processing and compression, namely Jpeg (for photos) e Mpeg (per i video).

If today people share images on social media, or exchange photos on Whatsapp, it is also thanks to Lena Forsén. The compression algorithms, in fact, they reduce the file size of a digital image without losing too much image detail. In this way digital photos take up little space in the devices memory and, above all, they can be transferred faster.

In all these years Lena Forsén has been widely celebrated by researchers. Some have nicknamed her “the first woman of the internet”. Others instead, “the patron saint of Jpeg”. James Hutchinson, a technical editor who worked at the University of Illinois, compared Lena’s image to “what Rita Hayworth represented to American soldiers in the trenches of World War II.”

In 1973, the year Professor Sawchuk began testing compression algorithms on the photo in question, the shot published by Playboy it even ended up in the film “The Sleepyhead” Of Woody Allen as one of the symbolic images of the twentieth century together with photo portraits of Stalin, Nixon and De Gaulle.

But the repeated use of the Swedish model’s face it has also been called “sexist” and for this reason, in the past, it has been the subject of criticism. For many, the shot of an “attractive woman” contributed to an academic climate dominated by male culture, in a field – the tech one – which already sees women strongly penalized by stereotypes and prejudices.

For this reason, a UCLA mathematics professor provocatively proposed, in 2013, using a photo of the model Fabio Lanzoni to carry out tests regarding image compression. Furthermore, already in 2018, magazine Nature announced that it would no longer accept scientific papers containing the Playboy photo with Lena Forsén.

And now too l’IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), an international non-profit association that has over 400,000 members worldwide, has decided that “from 1 April 2024 it will no longer accept scientific papers that contain Lena’s image”.

“I’m very proud of that photo” Lena Forsén had said to Wired USA, who interviewed the former model in 2019. But the woman then expressed different ideas about her role as an icon: “I retired from the catwalks a long time ago. And perhaps the time has come for me to retire from the tech world too. You’re starting to forget me.”

The ban by the IEEE, a source of authoritative texts on the progress of digital imaging, will help fulfill the former playmate’s wish.