Just Lena: the strange story of the best-selling issue of Playboy magazine

The best-selling issue of Playboy for all time was the issue for November 1972 with the Swedish model Lena Söderberg. The record for sales was set thanks to the "girl of the month" on the U-turn. However, the popularity of the number was not due to the beauty and sexuality of the model, but to the use of her picture in computer programming.

The story began in the summer of 1973, when a group of engineers at the University of Southern California helped a colleague, Alexander Savchuk, find a photo for research on image processing algorithms, according to a statement from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Someone suggested taking a photo from Playboy magazine for November 1972 with Pamela Rawlings on the cover. However, the engineers went beyond the first page and looked into the middle, coming across a photo shoot with Lena Cederberg. Since they were at work after all, they scanned only a fragment - the model's face and bare shoulder.

So the photo called "Lenna" went down in history. Scientific research on computer image processing formed the basis of JPEG and MPEG standards.

Since the source of the photo was indicated, other researchers bought several copies of the magazine to repeat the experiment. This boosted the release's sales and made it a collector's item among programmers. The image has essentially become the most used photograph of a woman when working on a computer.

The magazine with the photo shoot of Cederberg sold more than seven million copies, and the model herself became a real star in the circles of programmers. In 1997, she even attended a conference of the Imaging Science and Technology community, which deals with the science of collecting, storing, searching and processing visual information, and was happy to sign autographs there.

Not everyone liked the use of the image of the Playboy model in technology — from teachers in educational institutions to scientists who considered it a manifestation of sexism.

It is curious that representatives of Playboy magazine did not react to the use of the photo without their permission. In 1997 , in an interview , they only said: