100 Days

  • J Whitehead
In response to a short film I made exploring my identity and feelings toward my body (“10 second portraits of 6 different people”) I began documenting my face/body by taking one self-portrait a day and uploading it to Instagram (@S_cattered) in order to collate them. As I moved through the project I decided to set myself a time scale of 100 days since this would be enough time to notice changes in myself. Once I had a collection of 100 self-portraits, I decided that I wanted to make a photobook, showing the photos in chronological order with the hope to demonstrate change. When it came to adding text to these books I wanted to create something that would show how I felt about my body since my self-esteem was at an all-time low. I found myself self-depreciating in all of the text that accompanied the photographs but I let myself pour my feelings onto the page regardless, finding it strangely therapeutic. To accompany this, I wanted to contrast my own emotions with someone else’s so I selected a loved one who puts me on a pedestal to make their own comments on the photographs, creating a stark contrast between my own self-depreciative opinions and his hyper-positive opinions of me. It was incredibly interesting for me to explore who I am and want to be whilst really delving into the idea that beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder.