For The Better (Apologies 11/15/10 – 03/06/11) is a photographic project that documents how many times in a day I apologized. I used a hand counter and tick marks in a journal to monitor the amount of times I said “I’m Sorry” per day with the stipulation that if I reached a day when I did not apologize, I would stop keeping track, which happened on the 112th day, March 6th. Each apology translates to one exposure on a 4”x5” sheet of film. The accumulated negatives for each day are then consecutively exposed onto a single sheet of paper. The amount of apologies per day visually represents varying amounts of distortion in the self-portraits. All 112 prints are hung together in a grid chronologically to better visualize the progression and regression of my struggle with the phrase “I’m Sorry”. Depending on my use of the word “Sorry”, my image is transformed, distorted, and blurred from day to day. My hope with this project is twofold: to create a piece that allows personal growth as well as to test photography’s ability to show an internal psychological experience.
688 Apologies, the companion piece to For The Better (Apologies 11/15/10 – 03/06/11) displays the film in a dense stack, giving physical form to my apologies.