Soon, two older women emerged from a side street. Sign up for the Backchannel newsletter and never miss the best of WIRED. On a building nearby, a digital billboard flashed an ad for the Samsung S9+, showcasing its crisp camera. I waited under a large mushroom-shaped public sculpture, which provided much-needed shade. She’d told me to meet her on the Stureplan, a busy central square in one of the capital’s tonier districts. That's how, on a sweltering summer day in Stockholm, the object of tech’s original sin, the apple to Sawchuk’s Eve, came walking toward me. “She is now apart from all of that,” he wrote. He cautioned, though, that Lena might well decline. Finally, the chair of the conference, an academic named Jean-Luc Dugelay, agreed to put us in touch. I reached out to the conference organizers, who said that they no longer had her contact information and that the man who had orchestrated her visit had died. Photographs of the event showed her stepping onstage through a glistening projection of her younger self. After a series of fruitless searches, I discovered that the last time she’d appeared in public was in 2015, as a “special guest” at an image processing industry conference in Quebec City. For a first lady, she was remarkably difficult to find. I started looking for Lena about a year ago. “I’m just surprised that it never ends,” Forsen says about her unusual fame. “After some of them had spent 25 years looking at her picture, she just became this test image.” Since then, as the internet has grown to encompass billions of users and trillions of photos, no one has bothered to ask her what she makes of her image and its controversial afterlife. “As silly as it sounds, they were surprised she was a real person,” he told me. Jeff Seideman, a former chapter president of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, recalls that Lena’s presence at the conference caused a stir among his colleagues. (WIRED ran a short article on the visit titled “Playmate Meets Geeks Who Made Her a Net Star.”) The first and last time she spoke with the American press was in 1997, at the same conference where she was given her beloved mantel clock. One voice that has been conspicuously missing from the Lenna debate is that of Lena herself. “In Silicon Valley today, women are second-class citizens and most men are blind to it.” For Chang, the moment that Lena’s centerfold was torn and scanned marked “tech’s original sin.” “The prolific use of Lena’s photo can be seen as a harbinger of behavior within the tech industry,” she writes in the book’s opening chapter. But perhaps the most stringent critic of the image is Emily Chang, author of Brotopia. Deanna Needell, a math professor at UCLA, had similar memories from college, so in 2013 she and a colleague staged a quiet protest: They acquired the rights to a head shot of the male model Fabio Lanzoni and used that for their imaging research instead.
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