The photo is a hallmark of a simpler time: a time when Les Horribles Cernettes, an all-female band – their sound a pastiche of doo-wop and “high energy rock”—was preparing to take the stage in Switzerland on July 18, 1992.
It was then their manager decided to snap an impromptu photo, wherein the women stand coyly with gloved hands, wearing 1950’s-style clothing.
Tweaked using a primitive version of Photoshop software, the snap would go on to gain worldwide notoriety as the first photo ever posted to the World Wide Web—and the history behind the band is just as gloriously random as the image that immortalized them.
Les Horribles Cernettes was founded in 1990 by Michele de Gennaro, a 3D graphics designer for CERN—a European organization centered on nuclear research.
De Gennaro’s romantic relationship with a physicist – often busy working shifts – inspired the first woeful lyrics of a song, “Collider,” which chronicled the loneliness experienced as a physicist’s girlfriend.
The song, a flourish of lyrics like “I gave you a golden ring to show you my love/You went to stick it in a printed circuit/To fix a voltage leak in your collector/You plug my feelings into your detector,” was performed live at an intra-office music festival.
Joined by colleagues Angela Higney, Colette Marx-Neilsen, and Quebec native Lynn Verroneau, the band began composing songs largely inspired by life working in physics.
Though Verroneau is originally from Sherbrooke, she was reportedly working as a research administrator for Yale university at the time.
Les Horribles Cernettes gained notoriety for their off-beat style and went on to perform at International physics conferences, the ’92 world expo in Seville, as well as physicist George Charpak’s Nobel Prize party.
It was Tim Berners-Lee, an English engineer best known for inventing the World Wide Web, who reached out and solicited images of “the CERN girls” to publish.
Berners-Lee had first proposed his internet project while working as a software consultant at CERN. For the first few years of its existence, the web was used primarily to exchange information about physics research.
It would go on to become a historical milestone as the first picture to ever appear in a web browser.
However, its history is disputed. Silvio de Gennaro—the man who captured and edited the photo—once refuted the claim that his photo was the first ever on the internet, referring to it as the “first photo of a band” on the internet, as well as “one of those [photos] that changed the web from a platform for physics documentation, to a media for our lives.
If anything’s for certain, it’s that the image takes up a place in history as a primitive meme, or a cultural artifact of both humour and camp.
In honour of the photo’s 25th anniversary, Les Cernettes Horribles gathered for one final performance in Geneva, Switzerland.
