Lena Soderberg Bio 
Lena Soderberg is a Swedish actress, glamour and nude model. Born Lenna Sjooblom on March 31, 1951, in Stockholm, Sweden, she has also been credited as Lena Forsen and Lenna. Playboy named her its November 1972 Playmate at 21. Her appearance came during Playboy's 1970s print era, when the magazine reached the height of its mass-market influence.
Soderberg has natural breasts, blue eyes and brown hair. Her measurements are 34-26-36.
Lena Soderberg’s career took an extraordinary turn after she moved from Sweden to the United States as an au pair. In Chicago, she began modeling jewelry and appearing in catalogues, eventually reaching Playboy. Photographer Dwight Hooker photographed her centerfold, producing a session whose influence would extend far beyond anything normally expected from a magazine pictorial.
After Playboy, Soderberg moved to Rochester, New York, where she worked as a Kodak “Shirley”—one of the models whose photographs were used for calibrating color reproduction. Her image consequently appeared across Kodak advertising, catalogues and instructional material, while she also worked as a bartender. It was an unusually apt second act for someone whose face was about to become permanently entangled with the technical side of photography.
The real surprise came when a cropped head-and-shoulders section of her Playboy image began circulating among engineers under the name “Lenna.” Researchers adopted it as a standard test image for experiments involving digital image processing, compression and image reconstruction. Reproduced again and again in laboratories, academic papers and classrooms, the crop became one of computing’s most recognizable visual benchmarks—a Playboy photograph quietly performing technical duty for generations of engineers.
By 1997, Soderberg’s unexpected place in computer history was established enough for her to attend the 50th annual conference of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, where she spoke about herself and the photograph. Away from modeling, she was then working for a government agency supervising disabled employees and, with some irony, using computers and scanners as part of her job. In 2019 she said she remained proud of the original photograph, even if she wished she had benefited more financially from its enormous circulation.
Her attitude toward the image’s technological afterlife eventually became more complicated. In the documentary Losing Lena, Soderberg argued that just as she had retired from modeling, it was time for the technology community to retire the image as well. That gives her story an ending no Playboy photographer could have anticipated in 1972: a centerfold that escaped the magazine, became part of the working vocabulary of computer science, and decades later prompted the woman in the photograph to ask the digital world to finally move on.
