In my opinion the older the photo the more often it was trimmed. Pre WWI, you see A LOT of trimmed photos. In some archives as much as 80% of the pre WWI images are trimmed at some point by the newspaper editors or even the photographers by themselves. It has a lot to do with photographic processes at the time. Many collectors resort to the thinking that if it was trimmed before and has left a wavy inconsistent edge, cleaning it up a bit by trimming it nicer is not a sin, but touching a border that is original just to improve its condition is not acceptable. Similar to the philosophy of strip cards on the baseball side. If the card was already ripped or trimmed, most people don't care if you clean it up a bit. If you take an untouched sheet of strip cards and trim them all to make mint condition cards for grading, your going to have some detractors. After WWII you rarely see trimmed images with the exception of wire photos where newspapers often took off the captions and glued them to the back so they would not show up in publication.
|