O dear Lena, your beauty is so vast
It is hard sometimes to describe it fast.
I thought the entire world I would impress
If only your portrait I could compress.

The "first lady of the internet," was a Playboy's Miss November 1972. Her turn-offs include "Men who wear shorts with white socks and black shoes." Lena's issue was the most widely circulated issue of Playboy ever, selling 7,161,561 copies.

A single scanned image of Lena's Playboy appearance subsequently took up favor amongst digital imaging researchers. It has been used as a comparative standard in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of image compression tests, publications and shoot-outs.

"Killing Lena" is a rendered video series in which Lena's most famous photo is repeatedly exposed to the compression algorithms she unwittingly helped to develop.

 

Killing Lena (2007, 62.7MB, 5:49 min.)

References:
http://photoshopnews.com/2007/04/24/geek-love-the-lenna-story/
http://www.ee.cityu.edu.hk/~lmpo/lenna/Lenna97.html
http://www.hacksaw.org/~thomasc/old_mit/stories/lena.html
http://www.lenna.org/playboy_backups2/31a.html
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/lenna.shtml
http://ndevilla.free.fr/lena/

Notes on recursive compression