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Retweet Add This The first photographic image ever uploaded to the Web was a Photoshop disaster. It was created to sell something, and featured attractive women in a come-hither pose. In short, photo-uploading was born with some original sins that have never quite washed away. Here it is, in all its glory: Next Wednesday, July 18th, the photograph at the center of that image -- a homemade promotional shot for Les Horribles Cernettes, a comedy band based at the CERN laboratory near Geneva -- will turn 20 years old. Despite the artifact's world-historical significance, its full story has never been told. Few enthusiasts of art or photography or technology will be marking its 20th birthday, in no small part because it's such an odd and un-artistic image. Silvano de Gennaro "It's sort of terrible and charming," said Lesley Martin, a photo scholar at the Aperture Foundation, after being shown the image for the first time. But she added that that's par for the course with photographic firsts.
"They're always semi-accidental and seemingly inconsequential at the time," Martin told me. "The first photos are always, from the perspective of a sophisticated viewer today, somewhat non-events and of non-subjects." It wasn't even taken for the purposes of science or technology. The photographer, Silvano de Gennaro, was an IT developer at CERN who worked near Tim Berners-Lee and the other scientists who had invented the Web and made it public in 1991. On July 18th, 1992, de Gennaro was backstage at the Hardronic Music Festival, an annual event thrown by CERN's administrators, waiting for the Cernettes -- whom he managed, and whose songs he writes -- to come on stage. He wanted a picture for their next CD cover, so he told the four members to lean in and smile. "When history happens, you don't know that you're in it," de Gennaro said. From left: Angela Higney, Michele de Gennaro, Colette Marx-Neilsen, Lynn Veronneau. But why did the Cernettes become part of photographic history and not, say, a particle accelerator? "I don't know whether I should be telling you this, but he worked at CERN and I saw him because he was part of our pantomime in our amateur operatic society," remembered Colette Marx-Nielsen, a Cernettes member (she's second from the right in the photo). Tim Berners-Lee De Gennaro and his then-girlfriend Michele were also heavily involved in that dramatic society and befriended Berners-Lee there. But Berners-Lee wasn't the only one: the Cernettes, comprised of administrative assistants and significant others of scientists, were taking the European physics community by storm in 1992.
"Collider": You say you love me but you never beep me You always promise but you never date me I try to fax but it's busy, always I try the network but you crash the gateways You never spend your nights with me You don't go out with other girls either You only love your collider That year they were playing festivals and appearing on TV.
com/embed/hQkdk5OzEu8 "Surfin' on the Web," The Cernettes So when Berners-Lee and his team cooked up a new edition of their still-primitive World Wide Web system, one that could support photo files, he went a few steps from his workstation to ask de Gennaro for a Cernettes-related image. The Web had already used a few small vector image files to show off schematics, but Berners-Lee and his team needed a guinea pig for the leap into photos.
gif format was only five years old at the time, but its efficient compression had made it the best way to edit color images without slowing PCs to a crawl. "The Web, back in '92 and '93, was exclusively used by physicists," de Gennaro recalled. "I was like, Why do you want to put the Cernettes on that? You put a pretty girl in the media, people will notice the media. But the reason the image was so important in "selling" the Web's image support had less to do with attractive women than it did with taking a small -- but incredibly significant -- shift in the purpose of the network, Groff pointed out. Up until then, the team had put their program on the Internet to reach out to a few hundred outlets worldwide, mostly physics labs. Jean-Franois Groff "In order to convince management that we should connect CERN to the Internet and not just to proprietary networks, we had to fight to convince them how useful it would be," he said. The upload was simple and uneventful -- uploads of anything on the early Web were more like saving a word-processing doc than anything else, Groff recalled.
"I had many more people seeing that photo on the posters around CERN," de Gennaro posited. The image passed into obscurity, soon eclipsed by larger photographic projects (an effort to scan images from the Vatican archives was perhaps the most famous). gif was made died around 1998, de Gennaro recalled, and with it went the original version of the file. The Cernettes, circa 1999 The Cernettes have performed on and off with various lineups through the decades -- by sheer coincidence, their last-ever concert is scheduled for next Saturday. De Gennaro, who is now married to Michelle, said he's not sure whether she or her bandmates will mention the photo onstage. He added, with a small grunt of frustration, that the image's minor fame has always marginalized the group's musical work. But the nature of the band is essential to understanding some of the curious artistic significance of the photo. After all, this step into the future featured women wearing outfits that aped styles of the '50s. "This was this kind of retro parody image," said Harvard photo historian Robin Kelsey.
"It's interesting -- particularly for those of us who are relative old-timers -- to realize that this technology, which still feels so new, already has its own kind of archaeology now," Kelsey added. The Cernettes in 1992 That archaeology isn't currently in any textbooks.
the device that shares their initials,, the one that may have just discovered the Higgs boson. In any case, despite its significance, the subjects of the Web's first photo never thought of themselves as celebrities. "I suppose it had to be somebody, and it just happened to be us."
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