What I Am Looking For: The Six Criteria of a Project Authenticity Audit

Project Authenticity is a structured audit framework for corporate and ESG visual communications. When I review a report, I score it against six criteria. Each is marked on a five-point scale. The total gives an Authenticity Index out of 30. Most reports score well on one or two criteria and poorly on the rest. The gaps are rarely deliberate.

Here is what each criterion measures and why it matters.

01  Authenticity

Are the images real? Not stylised to look real, not performed for the camera, not sourced from a library of adequately convincing strangers. Are the people in these photographs the people who actually do this work?

This is the foundational question. Everything else depends on the answer. A technically accomplished image of the wrong people, in a constructed environment, doing a performed version of the work, scores zero on authenticity regardless of its production quality.

02  Narrative Coherence

Do the images support the written story, or do they simply decorate the page?

A photograph placed beside a claim about community engagement that shows a generic handshake has no narrative coherence. It has a gap. The reader registers that gap, often unconsciously, and it erodes confidence in the surrounding text.

Strong narrative coherence means the photograph earns its position. Remove it, and something specific is lost. Weak coherence means the image is interchangeable with any other photograph from the same stock collection.

03  Emotional Connection

Does the imagery invite the reader in?

Eye contact, proximity, human warmth, genuine expression. Or distance, obscured faces, and the studied blankness of a stock photograph.

Across my review of sixteen Western Canadian organisations, Emotional Connection was the lowest-scoring criterion. The average score was 2.1 out of 5. The most consistent failure: no one looks at the camera. Workers are photographed from a distance. Executives are framed against architecture. Communities are represented by landscapes.

Stakeholders judge authenticity faster than they read an opening statement. If nobody in the imagery is willing to look the reader in the eye, the report has already lost the argument before the first KPI.

04  Representation

Does the visual record reflect the actual workforce, the actual communities served, and the actual geography of the operation?

Or has it been curated toward an aspiration that does not yet match reality? This criterion is particularly relevant for organisations with Indigenous partnership commitments, diversity commitments, or community investment claims. The written narrative may be accurate. If the imagery tells a different story, the credibility gap is immediate.

05  Action Documentation

Are the commitments in the written narrative shown in practice?

Safety culture, environmental stewardship, community partnership, decarbonisation investment. These are either claimed or evidenced. The photograph is the evidence. If the commitment exists only in the copy and the imagery shows something generic or aspirational, the document is asserting rather than proving.

The distinction matters to stakeholders who have learned to read the gap between what organisations say and what they can demonstrate.

06  Indexicality

This criterion was added to the framework in November 2025, after the initial audit evidence showed that composite and AI-generated imagery was a structural problem the original five criteria did not fully capture.

Indexicality asks whether the photograph carries the physical trace of the real place, the real moment, and the real operation. A photograph taken on-site, by a photographer present at the actual event, with real people in their actual environment, is indexical. It is connected to reality by a direct physical chain.

A composite image, a stock photograph, or an AI-generated rendering is not. It carries no trace of anything. It is, in the precise sense, fiction.

When that fiction appears in a document making factual claims about an organisation's activities, the Visual Chain of Custody is broken. The photograph can no longer function as proof.

Why the Gaps Exist

The failures Project Authenticity identifies are rarely intentional. They are usually the result of photography being briefed too late, too broadly, or by someone whose primary job is not visual communication.

The brief goes to a production company. The production company delivers images that look professional. Legal reviews them for accuracy. Design places them on the page. Nobody in that chain asks whether the photograph carries evidential weight.

That is the problem Project Authenticity is designed to solve. Not by replacing the existing process, but by establishing what the brief should ask for before any photography takes place.

About Project Authenticity

Project Authenticity is now in its second version. PA 2.0 introduced Indexicality as a sixth criterion in November 2025, extending the original five-criterion, 25-point framework to a 30-point scale. The sixteen-organisation review referenced in this article was conducted under PA 1.0. Future audits use the updated framework.

Originally published: LinkedIn / The Story That Shows, 12 March 2026