I am not a skilled enough writer or thinker to take this on. This is my disclaimer that all of this can be beaten up by anyone with some thoughts and a stick to poke holes in what I'm talking about, but I've been thinking about it and talking about it and wanted to start focusing what I was thinking. I finish things if I have a project hanging over my head, so here I am hanging a project over my head. I'd love to talk about this with you, to hear your thoughts and see what you think and then see how that changes things.

 Image Authenticity

When photos are taken and printed from film there is a method of printing them photographically that creates a thin line around the frame of the border of the frame. To do this you file out the negative carrier, the metal piece that holds the negative in place in the enlarger. The more you file away the more of a black border there is. Since you usually can't file away that amount very accurately there is a rough edge to the black line.
To the left is an image printed with a filed out negative carrier. Normally this is done with black and white images, since printing your own black and white images is so much more common, but this is a good example. The image is full frame - meaning the entire 35 MM. piece of film that was exposed in the camera is being printed. The metal piece that sits in the enlarger to hold the negative was filed out so that you could see the edges of the negative.
This is a medium format image, instead of printing with a filed out negative carried this photo was probably scanned and then the art director placed the photo with the photo showing. I'm okay with this

The original point of filing out the negative carrier was to show people that the photographer composed the photograph in the camera and didn't alter the composition during the printing stage. The idea that composing when the photo is taken as compared to when it is printed is another subject. There are ideas that composing in the camera is more difficult than composing by cropping to get just the image you want when printing.

I was introduced to the black border early in my experience with photography, when I saw it the first time I thought it was just aesthetically pleasing, I didn't understand the idea that it was a proof of full frame printing, since learning the full frame theory behind it the idea has been enticing in both ways, as a proof that I'm shooting the photo the way that I intend for them to be seen as well as the aesthetic look.

The aesthetic look in an interesting idea. People have been filing out the edges of negative carriers for a long time, surely the manufacturers make a slightly enlarged option for showing a clean black line around the frame, but the aesthetic of the rough looking filed out edge speaks to us in a way, it makes it as authentic. For me Authentic is a funny word, we hear it thrown around a lot, and I almost always make the funny air quotes when I say “authentic” because what does it mean? How can anything be authentic, is making a color adjustment to an image change it's authenticity, does taking a picture change the authenticity of the subject? Can you get authentic Mexican food anywhere but Mexico? Authentic is a challenging concept, and hopefully I'll be able to get some good links and more thoughts on it soon.

For now I just wanted to start showing images where there is an attempt to reach for authenticity, but it ends up being so much less than authentic.
The image above is a great image to show the zaniness of the use of "Authenticity borders". So the above image, or images are put together in a way that can't happen in a "natural" way. The images above are from polaroids -- the type that professional photographers use to proof an image (or did before digital). But the image on the left is way to small and polaroids don't come in rows like this. I think the artistic or aesthetic way is fine, but to take an identity of authentic edges and apply it in a way that can't be authentic seems very odd. This can't even be two images because of the proportion of the images. I don't think it's wrong, but it's just a funny thing. Another example of advertising / marketing commodifying an image or an idea of art and to use it in a way that is different than the original idea.
The image to the left is the opposite example of the issue. Here you have a slightly different issue, but I'm lumping it in. Here you have a project where a designer used a strip of images across the top of a catalog. The images are laid out to look like a negative strip, another case of someone leveraging authenticity. Here the problems are two fold, first the images are too diverse, it's not how images for advertising are taken, usually there are multiple
photos of each scene being photographed, because the photographer will try different angles and exposures searching for just the right image. Here though there were six unique images all good photos. Secondly The black border surrounding the image is really what gets me. Its again created to appear like a strip of negatives, although there are no sprocket holes in the image - which is a problem - how would the film move through the camera? Another issue is the sharpness of the text and numbers. When negative strips are printed these always become less sharp. While the results are different it's another use by marketing / advertising to take a look of authenticity, but to make it pretty or more visually pleasing. It's a very awkward idea, to show something as authentic or real, but then deciding that the real isn't esthetically pleasing enough and had to clean it up and make it more appealing.
It's fairly appalling that in my writings about photography I'm publishing really bad photos of what I'm talking about, but - the next example is the example that gets me the most. This was an ad for coffee and the use of "Authenticity borders" was odd. It was layered on top of a pattern that to me appeared to be a coffee bag - but not the shiny glossy bags that you are used to taking home your coffee in, I'm speaking here of the canvas bags that coffee is shipped in. Now if this was a photo printed with a filed out negative carrier then the area around the edges would be white until the end of the photo paper. Instead its transparent, which actually indicates that the border was added in Photoshop. Actually there is a program written (Not by Adobe) to add these borders to images. While this use was very obvious, it's actually one of the better uses at least it doesn't vary from the original idea of the borders and the image is in the correct proportions.
This example yet again amazes me, this was on the cover of a brochure for the Northwest Photographic Center. The image is a Polaroid, so I'm fine with the edges, actually I love the look of those borders, but the mixed up proportions really gets me. The use of borders was started to show that am image was in proportion and full frame. Here we have the full frame part but we lose the proportion. Here I'm sure it was just the desire to fill the narrow cover of the brochure, but what do you lose when you distort. With desktop publishing software it's very easy to distort images, much easier than it used to be when images were stripped in by hand and thus you get distorted images much more often. This image is more of a pet peeve than a good point in the overall image authenticity issue I'm working with, but it's still here because it bugs me.