Lenna Sjööblom

Lenna was Playmate of the Month for November 1972. Her pictorial was titled Swedish Accent.

Lenna was born Lena Söderberg on March 31, 1951, in Sweden.

According to a 2019 story in Wired, Lenna moved to the United States in 1963 to work as an au pair for one of her relatives and stayed in the country. In 1971, she was living in Chicago with her new husband, who encouraged her to sign up with a local modeling agency. She did some commercial modeling and then got in contact with Playboy, who “wanted my mouth for a cover.” The Playboy photographer asked her if she would like to model for a pictorial. “I didn’t really know what that was,” she told Wired. “But my husband, he thought it was kind of cool, and it was money and I didn’t have a lot of money.”

Following her Playmate of the Month pictorial, Lenna and her husband divorced. She moved with a new boyfriend to Rochester, NY, where she worked as a Kodak model and occasionally worked nights as a bartender at a local Marriott. She appeared in many Kodak catalogs, ads and instruction manuals.

According to “The Playmate Book: Five Decades of Centerfolds,” Lenna went back to Sweden, married and had a family.

A head-and-shoulders section of Lenna’s centerfold is often used to test algorithms in digital image processing. Reportedly, a group of engineers at the University of Southern California in 1973 were looking for an image to scan and happened upon the November issue of Playboy. Since then, the image — commonly referred to as the “Lenna” — has been the industry standard. Lenna was a guest at the 50th annual Conference of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology in 1997, where she gave a presentation about herself. According to a 2019 story in Wired, Lenna has a mantle clock in her home dedicated to “The First Lady of the Internet,” given to her by the society.

A 25-minute documentary film explores the image and Lenna’s life. Titled “Losing Lena,” and made by Australian filmmakers Francesca Walker and Kyra Bartley, the film was released through Facebook Watch in 2019. “I had never shot a nude photograph before Playboy or after,” Lenna says in the film. “I was proud about that picture; I thought it was pretty nice.”

As of 2019, Lenna was a 67-year-old retiree living in Sweden.

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Digital | Later in life

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