Even if you don’t care about the ethical reasons, the copy everyone uses has been printed and re-digitized so it isn’t a great reference in the first place. About time.
It is a picture of the Swedish model Lena Forsén, shot by photographer Dwight Hooker, cropped from the centerfold of the November 1972 issue of Playboy magazine.
Wet film photography -> magazine centrefold reproduction was entirely sans digital in 1972.
The first digitization came later
The engineers tore away the top third of the centerfold so they could wrap it around the drum of their Muirhead wirephoto scanner, which they had outfitted with analog-to-digital converters (one each for the red, green, and blue channels) and a Hewlett Packard 2100 minicomputer.
at 100 dpi
The Muirhead had a fixed resolution of 100 lines per inch and the engineers wanted a 512×512 image, so they limited the scan to the top 5.12 inches of the picture, effectively cropping it at the subject's shoulders.
Which highlighs why it's been such a poor reference for more than three decades now.
It was never digital to begin with
Wet film photography -> magazine centrefold reproduction was entirely sans digital in 1972.The first digitization came later
at 100 dpi Which highlighs why it's been such a poor reference for more than three decades now.