Sex, Bombs and Burgers (21 page)

Many previous Playmates had basked in the media attention their magazine appearances drew, but Sjööblom fled the spotlight as soon as it hit her. Shortly after the issue was released she moved to Rochester, New York, to do some low-profile modelling work for Eastman Kodak catalogues. In 1977, with her short-lived
Playboy
fame faded, Sjööblom ended her American adventure and returned to a quieter life back in Sweden, where she found work as an administrator in the state liquor agency.

The seeds of her real fame, however, were sprouting in a small laboratory in Los Angeles, where the first significant research on digital image processing was taking place. Scientists at the University of Southern California had been working on transforming print photos into electronic formats since the early sixties, and by the seventies had established the school as a global leader in the field. In 1971 the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Department of Defense section responsible for the development of new technology, acknowledged that status by giving the university a contract to digitize images so that they could be transmitted across its newly minted communications network, the ARPAnet. Two years earlier military engineers had successfully tested the network, the precursor to the internet, and the Pentagon wanted to put as much data on it as possible, including photos. The university established a proper research facility, the Signal and Image Processing Institute, to tackle this challenge.
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In a time before scanners and other readily available digital technology, SIPI’s mission was daunting.

SIPI researchers built one of the world’s first digital photo scanners at a cost of $250,000, a sizeable fortune at the time.
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Newspapers and wire services had been using scanners since before the Second World War, but their devices were analogue
and captured a much-degraded reflection of the photo. SIPI’s digital scanner converted photos into the ones and zeros of binary code, which made it easier to manipulate them on computers and transmit them over communications networks. Researchers used the machine to scan photos of simple textures such as wood grains and leather, then aerial pictures taken from planes and spy satellites. From there, they moved on to more varied and colourful photos, including shots of trees, houses and jellybeans. The images were scanned and manipulated on computers through the application of algorithmic patterns, which bent, distorted, fragmented, disassembled, reassembled, blurred and sharpened them. By late 1972, however, the researchers were dying for a human face.

Alexander Sawchuk, then an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the institute, recalls that his team was desperate for a new test image because they “were tired of looking at all those other pictures.”
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One team member ran out to the nearest magazine store and picked up the latest
Playboy
, the fateful Lena issue. The magazine was chosen because it was one of the few publications that had full-colour, high-quality glossy photos— Hugh Hefner insisted on using only the best photography and paper stock to avoid having his product considered a low-end skin rag—and its centrefold was ideal because it was the right size. Photos were wrapped around the scanner’s cylindrical drum, which measured thirteen centimetres by thirteen centimetres. Folded to hide the “naughty bits,” the top third of the centrefold fit perfectly.

The picture featured a nude Sjööblom standing in front of a full-length mirror, looking back at the viewer over her right shoulder with long brown hair cascading down her back. She
wore a floppy hat with a dangling blue feather, a pair of short black boots and stockings, and had a beckoning look in her eyes, punctuated by a mysterious Mona Lisa-like smile. Cropped to show only her head and shoulders, the picture was ideal for image research because it contained a range of colour, had areas that were in and out of focus, and had alternating smooth and detailed sections. The skin tones were flat and simple while the feather on the hat was brimming with detail. It was the perfect candidate for the photo manipulation techniques Sawchuk and his crew had in mind.

SIPI first distributed the Lena image on tapes to researchers at other universities along with three other test photos: a pair of peppers, a fighter jet in flight and a colourful close-up of a mandrill’s face. Sawchuk and his team, however, didn’t tell anyone where they had found their sexy test subject. The picture was rescanned and finally transmitted over the ARPAnet in 1975.
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At the time, the new field of image research was virtually all male and relatively youthful, so it was no surprise which picture got the most attention. Even a fighter jet couldn’t compete with a photo of a beautiful, naked woman.

While the other three images were all but ignored, Sjööblom’s picture quickly became the industry’s de facto standard. As imaging publications noted in later years, it was impossible to work in the industry without being constantly exposed to the photo, which became known simply as “the Lena.” Thumbing through industry journals in the seventies and eighties often turns up more than one Lena, sometimes dozens. “If the criterion is frequency of Lena, then the
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
is by far the sexiest journal out there,” read a 2001 newsletter from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
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The story behind the photo, like the best urban legends, was gradually forgotten. As the years wore on, scores of imaging scientists went about their daily algorithms without a clue as to where their sexy test subject came from. To them, she was “just Lena.”
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Like a modern-day Sleeping Beauty, however, the photo’s past was awakened in July 1991, when it was published on the front cover of industry journal
Optical Engineering
. The periodical’s editors didn’t know the photo belonged to
Playboy
and
Playboy
’s staff had no idea it was being used so widely by the research community.
Playboy
’s management sent a stern letter asking the journal’s editors to seek authorization before using any of the magazine’s images in the future, a request
Optical
Engineering
was happy to oblige.
¹¹

As word of the photo’s origins spread and political correctness crept into society and the imaging community, the controversy deepened and the objections multiplied, many stemming from the belief that
Playboy
exploited women. David Munson, editor of the
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
, urged scientists in a 1996 editorial to use other pictures for testing purposes, both to broaden their studies and to placate the many researchers, both men and women, who had complained to him. Munson says his editorial had its intended effect—after 1996, use of Sjööblom’s image dropped off. “People don’t talk about it as much as they used to,” he says.
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Nevertheless, by the mid-nineties the Lena had more than made its mark. In the seventies, it took several hours to transmit a photo over the ARPAnet. Using a good test image, researchers were able to refine compression algorithms to both shrink the size of files and speed up transmission technologies. In effect, they made the pipes faster and the data sent over them smaller.
Transmission times of electronic photos dropped exponentially as a result. By the late eighties SIPI’s research had led standards bodies to agree on standardized formats for compressed images, including the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) and Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), as well as video compression with the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) standard.

Sawchuk is quite proud of that fact. When I visited USC, he showed me the original lab where the Lena photo was scanned. The space, on the third floor of one of the university’s engineering buildings, its imaging equipment moved long ago, now sits largely unused and looks like any nondescript classroom. Still, Sawchuk beams with pride in showing it off. “We should have a plaque on the door that says, ‘This is where the JPEG was born.’”

The JPEG became hugely important after the American government allowed phone companies such as MCI to connect their commercial email services to its ARPAnet in 1988, a move that effectively created the internet. Electronic text and images were married shortly after, in 1993, with the launch of Mosaic, the first software program to combine the two elements on a single “page” that resided on the internet. The pages became collectively known as the World Wide Web and individually as websites. Image compression work continued through the nineties and, combined with ever-faster network speeds, culminated in near-instantaneous transmission and loading of photos on the internet and Web by the early 2000s, with video not far behind. JPEGs, GIFs and MPEG also became the de facto image and video standards on the Web.

Miss Internet of the World

On my visit to SIPI, Sandy Sawchuk told me a story that pretty much summed up the broad reach of “the Lena.” In the mideighties he was visiting the state university of Novosibirsk, a Siberian city deep in the heart of communist Russia, when he was asked if he would like to see the school’s imaging lab. “Would I? Of course I would,” he told me. “So they showed me around and there of course was the Lena.” I also showed the picture to Vint Cerf, the legendary computer scientist who made the first connection on the ARPAnet, and he instantly recognized it. Like many who work in his field, however, Cerf had no idea it was a
Playboy
image until I told him. Kevin Craig,
Playboy
’s digital lab manager, tells the other side: “I asked one of the IT guys here and I mentioned her name and he instantly knew who it was. I asked him, ‘Is it more of an inside-IT geek thing?’ and he said that’s exactly what it is.”
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The imaging community suitably honoured Sjööblom, the Playmate who inadvertently influenced all those IT geeks, in 1997. Jeff Seideman, then-president of the Boston chapter of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, tracked her down in Sweden and invited her to appear as the guest of honour at the group’s fiftieth anniversary convention. By this point, Sjööblom had three children and several grandchildren and was going through a divorce. She was managing an office that employed disabled people to scan and archive corporate financial records, ironically using technology that traced its lineage back to SIPI. Seideman, a marketing specialist amid a sea of imaging scientists, convinced
Playboy
to capitalize on its former Playmate’s fame. The magazine paid for her flight to Boston, and when she showed up at the convention, attendees
were floored. The forty-six-year-old still had her figure, but her long auburn tresses were gone in favour of a short cut, now grey. Her eyes, however, still had that mysterious spark. “Many of them had spent their entire professional lives staring at her picture and had long since forgotten that she was a real person,” Seideman says. “I introduced her to the main meeting and people were speechless. This creature that we dodged and burned and manipulated and sharpened and did obscene mathematical formulas to was a real human being.”
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Sjööblom was just as surprised. She had no idea how famous her picture had become. She graciously met and spoke with convention delegates and signed autographs, including copies of her
Playboy
issue. Kodak, the firm that had produced the first electronic camera and for which she had modelled, set up a booth where convention attendees could have their picture taken with Sjööblom, creating a virtual Möbius strip for the digital age. Sjööblom returned home to Järna with fond memories. Aside from her family and a few friends, no one there knows of her fame. A self-confessed Luddite, she doesn’t really understand the impact her photo had. “I’m not into the internet,” she told me over the phone from Sweden. She does, however, like the clock the imaging scientists gave her as a keepsake. “It’s pretty cool.”

Digital Shift

The same research that went into communications networks also paved the way for the development of many consumer electronic devices, notably digital cameras. Some of the earliest work on devices that could record images onto tapes rather than film began in the early seventies at Fairchild Semiconductor,
the company started by William Shockley’s “traitorous eight.” In 1973 Fairchild developed the charge-coupled device (CCD), a light sensor chip that would in later years serve as the brains of a digital camera in much the same way that a microprocessor powers a computer. Kodak licensed the chip, which converted what was seen by a camera lens into an electronic file, and quietly built the first digital camera—a hefty, four-kilo device—in 1975.

The camera took twenty-three seconds to record a single black-and-white photo onto a cassette tape, which was then played back on a television screen through a separate, additional console. Kodak patented the camera in 1977, but didn’t put it into production because of its size and complexity.
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Steven Sasson, the engineer who built it, later said the company had applied Moore’s Law, which stated that electronics capabilities doubled roughly every eighteen months, to estimate when the digital camera would be compact and cheap enough to reach the general consumer market. Kodak’s best guess was fifteen to twenty years, which proved to be fairly close to the mark: “but in reality, we had no idea,” Sasson added.
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The irony in Kodak’s work on the electronic camera, which was kept secret for competitive reasons, was that Sjööblom—whose test image was doubtlessly used in the device’s development—was modelling for the company, not that Sasson or his team could have done anything about it even if they knew. Security around the camera was so tight that no one outside of technical staff was allowed into his lab, nor was he permitted to take it outside. Besides, Sasson told me, Sjööblom’s looks would have been squandered. “I had no idea that she was working there. I would have loved to have a model come and sit, but ... they would have been wasted on the quality of the camera.”
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Other camera and technology companies noticed Kodak’s patent and got to work on their own electronic devices. By the eighties, some had made significant progress in improving picture-capture times, camera weights and image sizes. Sony made a major breakthrough in 1981 when it developed a fivecentimetre-by-five-centimetre video floppy disc that allowed it to do away with tapes. Electronic cameras continued to improve throughout the decade, but by the nineties their photo quality was still nowhere near as good as film and they cost upward of $20,000. Still, there were some interested buyers, such as newspapers and the American military, both of whom deployed Kodak electronic cameras in the first Gulf War in 1991. The end of film really began in 1990, when Switzerland-based Logitech released the first true digital camera, which converted images to binary code, connected to a computer and stored images on a memory card.