Below Is The Playboy Photograph,

that change the way we view photographs on the Internet,

photograph Dwight Hooker, 1972, and gave us the worldwide JPEG standard, in 1972, Lena Sjööblom for the first and last time posed nude for a magazine, Playboy, meanwhile at the University of Southern California’s Signal and Image Processing Institute, electrical engineer Alexander Sawchuk and his team were working on image-processing algorithms for computers, the team’s work would eventually contribute to the development of the JPEG file format, one of the most common image formats we still use today, the researchers were bored with the old test images and wanted a photo with a human face, interesting textures, and a glossy finish to test the limits of the technology, and by shear happenstance a November 1972 issue of Playboy just happened to be lying around, the top 5.12 inches of the page used fitted into the Muirhead wirephoto scanner, making a 512 x 512 pixel image, the image suited their purposes so well, they gave the scans to other researchers working on similar image processing tasks, and it eventually travelled so widely that it was accepted as a standard across the industry, for years, Lena herself had no idea any of this was happening, She was living quietly in Sweden, unaware of the ruckus her photoshoot had stirred among computer geeks in the US. It was not until she was invited to the Fiftieth Annual Conference of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology in 1997 that she understood the scope at which her image was being used, let alone as the gold standard for more than twenty years, She had never even accessed the internet until then! I have no idea if Lena ever received any royalties for her photograph other than from Playboy, I guess not, as Playboy gave permission to use the photograph for educational and research purposes, for the full story of how this photograph impacted the graphics world, have a look here at gizmodo, fascinating.