Tired of the usual stock photos (pictures of glossy bell peppers and colourfully masked mandrills), they turned to a familiar source of enticing imagery: Playboy. Its use for this purpose began in the summer of 1973, when a group of researchers at the University of Southern California’s Signal and Image Processing Institute were casting around for a new picture to practise their work on. ![]() This is the Lena image (sometimes ‘Lenna’), which for nearly fifty years has been the default test subject for image compression algorithms, including the now ubiquitous JPEG format. Yet despite their numbing infinite variety, these images all owe their sharpness and vibrancy to the legacy of a single photograph: a picture of a naked woman in a cluttered attic, a straw hat with feather trim worn at a rakish angle, face turned back over her shoulder to fix the camera with a bright, enigmatic eye. ![]() ![]() Pick up your phone or surf the web and you will be immersed in pictures of war-torn cities and grinning politicians friends’ holidays and strangers’ parties heavenly salads and impish kittens.
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