This is on-going; Research into Corrine Day form a variety of different internet sources all of which are identified. None of this is my work as yet.
If you're looking for a simple intro to the work of Corrine Day have a look at this book
here especially if you're a student studying Photography at Level 3
Primarily I'm looking to establish that Corrine Day is up there with David Bailey as one of the most influential fashion photographers ever. One of the other things I'm trying to establish is what equipment she uses. As a reader of the Face magazine prior to its demise, I have this vague recollection of some information that she used compact cameras for some of her shots, but as yet I can't quantify this. At the time of writing Nov 2013, I've established that for her later commissioned work she used Hasselblads and for a lot of the documentary work she used a Pentax 35mm camera. This is evident from the image below (Contact sheet). The image below that shows a set-up image which initially looks as though it's the photographer caught in the image, but it's not the angle is completely wrong and you can see from the way the bloke is holding the camera and therefore not Corrine Day, it's not a photographer at all. But, the question begs - whose camera is it and is one that Day had at the location/in her 'Kit Bag'?
I've contacted one of her assistants who worked with her on some of her shoots and asked him if he ever spoke to her about the way that work was made. I'm still waiting to hear back from him.
1st Oct 2014- I didn't get a response but have added this today...
Check the link and have a read of the text - it's one of the better accounts alluding to how influential Corrine Days work is.
Source -
http://katiesmithcmp.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/corinne_day_press_371.jpg
Some of her work is being exhibited at the moment and I'm hoping to go and have a look.
http://www.gimpelfils.com/pages/exhibitions/exhibition.php?exhid=104&subsec=1
Research...
Corinne Day Biography
Corinne Day (b1965) is a British photographer whose
influence on the style and perception of photography in the early 1990s has
been immense. As a self taught photographer, Day brought a more hard edged
documentary look to fashion image making, in which she often included
biographical elements. Day is known for forming long and close relationships
with many of her sitters (most famously Kate Moss), which have resulted in
candid and intimate portraits. The most notable of these being the photographs
of Moss in the 3rd Summer of Love editorial for the FACE magazine in 1990. Days
approach as illustrated within the lifestyle and fashion magazines of the
1990s, came to be known as grunge and grew into an international style.
In 1993 Day photographed Kate Moss in her own flat for
British Vogue. In the context of a fashion magazine the images appear to have a
documentary feel about them and when published caused a certain frisson of
discomfort.
For the following seven years Day spent much of her personal
time taking photographs for her first book, Diary (Kruse Verlag, 2000), an
intensely personal visual record of her life and friends. It is by turns both
bleak and dispearing but it is also a tender, poetic and honest chronicle of
young lives.
Corinne Day continues to take photographs for fashion
magazines. She is regularly commissioned by British, Italian and Japanese
Vogue. Days work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, Victoria & Albert
Museum, Tate Modern,
Saatchi Gallery, The Science Museum, The design Museum, Photographers Gallery,
Gimpel Fils London and included in The Andy Warhol exhibition at the Whitney
Museum NY.
Corinne Day wasn't like other fashion photographers. "I
like my images to have a certain amount of realness in them," she told me in
2007.
"Fashion magazines," she frowned, "it's all
fantasy, isn't it? I've always liked to go in the opposite direction."
In fact, you might say Corinne Day wasn't a fashion
photographer. "I've never liked fashion photography," she said.
"It's so superficial." She'd never have wanted a limited-edition
unicorn-skin designer bag.
One year on from her untimely death at the age of 48, Day's
work, legacy and memory are being celebrated with a new exhibition. The venue -
a Mayfair gallery - might not have appealed to
the non-glam, uncompromising, rock'n'roll-loving artist whose bare, naked,
naturalistic photography revolutionised her industry.
But she would have approved of the organisers' model
selection. Kate Moss, who features in most of the pictures on show at Gimpel
Fils, was a gawky 15-year-old Croydoner when Day first photographed her.
Corinne Day: The Face, which opens today, draws together images she shot for
the iconic style magazine in the early Nineties.
Day helped Moss become the face of The Face.
My years as deputy editor of the magazine came a few years
after the heyday of the Corinne'n'Kate show. But their groundbreaking
collaborations continued to help define what our magazine was about long after
they had moved on to Vogue, "grunge/heroin chic", supermodel status
and international fame.
Moss's first appearance in The Face was on the July 1990
cover. The "3rd Summer Of Love" issue promised "Stone Roses on Spike Island,
an A-Z of the new bands, Daisy Age fashion, Hendrix and psychedelia". What
better to convey all this than a black and white image of a freckly, toothily
smiling teenager in a feather head-dress? Yes, the fashion shoot took place on
a beach, but it was none-more-grey Camber Sands. This was British youth culture
- British youth - at its buzziest best. The pictures were fresh, fun, carefree
of pretension, completely honest and totally now. It was 21 years ago, but they
still look totally now now.
Day's visual "style" - baggy knickers, no
make-up, the bedsit as studio, a radiator as prop - had floated into existence
during her own modelling days in Milan.
"I'd photograph my girlfriends who were models. We were all so poor,
living on bread and wine and spliffs!" she told me. "And I just used
to document them in their pyjamas, pissed and stoned, just for fun, just as a
hobby."
Moss became Day's muse. They lived together for a while, and
worked together for three hectic years.
Later they didn't speak for seven years - "her life
went that way, my life went that way" - but in 2007 Day photographed Moss
for the National Portrait Gallery's permanent collection.
In 2009, friends of Day announced they were trying to raise
£100,000 to pay for treatment for her in an Arizona clinic. At Christmas 1996 she'd
undergone treatment for a brain tumour and had fought illness ever since. The
"Save The Day" campaign auctioned prints of some of her portraits of
Moss. The money poured in but the treatment didn't work. Corinne Day died on
August 27, 2010.
She had documented her 1996 operation in her 2000 photographic
book Diary. Why had she done that?
"I just carried on living!" Corinne Day laughed.
"I had an operation, I came out on Christmas Day and I
went to a party on New Year's Eve. And just carried on life."
You can see such life, that vivacity, on show at Corinne
Day: The Face.
Below is an interview that Diane Smyth had with Corinne
Day in 2008. The article was published in the American magazine PDN.
PDN: How did you get into photography?
Corinne Day: It all just happened by accident. I was living
in Italy
with my boyfriend Mark, and he taught me how to use a camera. As soon as I
started taking photographs, I loved it. I felt I’d found my feet.
I took photographs of friends who were models, drinking red
wine, smoking joints. I didn’t like Eighties fashion because it was all so
fake—shoulder pads and makeup. I’d worked as a model in Italy and I
always thought the models looked so much more beautiful in everyday life than
in the magazines. I liked it when they were being themselves; they looked so
much more relaxed and natural.
Then an old friend of mine in LA, a model agent, saw my
photographs and said, “They’re great, go to a magazine.” I said, “I don’t think
they’ll like them.” But he recommended me to The Face. So [the] next time
I was in London
I went to see them. They liked them, but told me to go and do a shoot with a
model, but I didn’t know any models, I hadn’t lived in London for years. So I had to go to the
agencies, and that was how I met Kate [Moss].
I looked at her and thought, “She’s like me.” I knew how the
models felt, especially when they were new, and also she was cheeky, and I
really liked that. That’s how it all began. We helped each other out.
PDN: What did you make of the controversy over the 1993
shoot with Kate Moss?
Day: It’s not often that a photograph, especially a fashion
photograph, is controversial. I didn’t understand why people were so upset. I
thought they [the photographs] were funny.
PDN: Robin Muir [former picture editor of
British Vogue] has said that you “opened the door” to photographers such
as Juergen Teller, David Sims, Glen Luchford and Nigel Shafran. Do you follow
their work?
Day: I haven’t followed what they’re doing—I don’t look at
what’s in fashion, I just do my thing. But I would say we’ve all gone in
different directions. For example, I’m not sure if Nigel ever really liked
fashion, he’s always been the same, just doing what he wanted, taking pictures
for himself not anyone else. It’s different for me, I do love fashion, and I
enjoy working for Vogue. I’m always inspired by fashion.
PDN: You’ve said that fashion photography is 80 percent
casting. Do you still believe that?
Day: Yes. One of the reasons I love shooting fashion stories
is that you can create a character, an individual like you’ve never seen
before, but you try to bring out the model’s personality and the clothes so
that it looks more real. It helps if the subject has a strong personality—that
comes through. It comes through much better than the clothes.
It’s easier to shoot if you know the model well because they
relax and you get more from them. You don’t have to tell them what to do—it’s
hard to explain. Kate and I were very close friends and I could just photograph
her and not even talk to her. My fashion photographs of her were really
portraits.
I like to see a really beautiful girl who doesn’t know she’s
beautiful. It’s a more natural beauty. I’ve always been interested in Kate, and
I still am. But when she didn’t know she was such a beauty, she was amazing.
PDN: What was it like shooting Scarlett Johansson [for
BritishVogue, May 2004]? Are you comfortable shooting more glamorous images
now?
Day: British Vogue asked me to photograph her. I
enjoyed it. I’d never shot her before but she was really natural and it was an
easy shoot to do. I wanted her to forget I was there and for this lovely face
to come through. Inside the magazine, I did get a picture of her when she’d
just had her makeup done, with her feet up, looking more real. But the cover
shot is very glamorous; they chose the dress, so it wasn’t real.
I find glamour interesting now. When I first started taking
fashion pictures, I wanted to go in a different direction to where fashion was
supposed to go at the time and take more documentary pictures. At the time,
British Vogue only had very glamorous shoots, so I wanted to show models
with no make up. But you move on. Now I work in a different way. Holes in
jumpers [sweaters] are something I used to like—you go off fashions. I liked it
then, but I don’t wear holey clothes any more.
PDN: Your shoot for British Vogue, October 2007,
features couture clothes and a photograph of a model posing with a giraffe. Was
that a nod to Richard Avedon’s “Dovima and the Elephants”?
Day: It wasn’t a nod to Avedon! I was in the car with my
husband driving past the zoo at [London's]
Regent’s Park and I saw these giraffes, and thought, “wouldn’t it be nice to do
a shoot with them, because they’re so tall and elegant, just like models.” Then
I had a call from Kate Phelan, the fashion director at British Vogue,
asking me if I’d do a shoot at Victoria and Albert Museum,
very glamorous, all couture dresses. It all started from there, it was nothing
to do with Avedon.
PDN: Many of your fashion shoots are in unusual
locations—everywhere from the Glastonbury
festival to Kate Moss’s apartment. Do you enjoy shooting on location?
Day: I like to work in the studio, but I love to work on
location. A location can make an image more gutsy, so it doesn’t necessarily
look like a fashion shot. It can look more documentary or more arty. My
favorite location was a condemned old tower block [public housing project] in
Hackney [East London]. It was amazing. My
friend Emma found it—she was working for the local council so she got
permission for me to shoot there.
PDN: I’ve read that Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual
Dependency had a big effect on you and your work. Could you say a bit more
about it?
Day: In 1993 I had just been asked to do a campaign for
Barnes & Noble and while I was there I went and had a look at their
photography section. I’d never seen a photography book before, but the first
thing I picked up was Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. It really
opened my eyes—I realized that photography could go wherever you want.
PDN: Did that spark the Diary project?
Day: I’d already started to photograph my life and friends
but, as I said, Nan’s book made me realize how
far you can go. At that time, I thought everything should be photographed.
The Diary didn’t start out as a book, it became a book about
three years after I started taking the pictures. I did the Diary for seven
years, photographing everything, but I got bored of it after a while. Now I
don’t want to photograph my whole life day by day. It’s a time in my life that
wouldn’t happen again. You go through a phase in your life, then you move on.
I’d definitely like to do another book, I’m putting some
ideas together now. It’s just a matter of finding the time. I want to do a book
and an exhibition—it’s really nice to be in galleries. But again, it’s just
getting around to getting the work printed and putting it into the galleries.
PDN: A lot of the images in the Diary are of your
contemporaries, but you also included photographs of your grandmother. Why did
you do that?
Day: She was such an important person in my life. She was a
fantastic person, so stylish and such a massive influence on me.
Maybe it’s because I was raised by my nan, but I really like
photographing really old women—in their 70s, 80s, 90s. I find old faces really
interesting. They’ve lived a life, these women. You can learn from them.
PDN: I’ve heard you asked your boyfriend to photograph you
when you went in for brain surgery. Why did you ask him to do that?
Day: When I was going under I asked Mark to photograph me. I
told him, “Stand there so I can’t see the doctors,” but I was also thinking
about how he was going to take the picture rather than what was happening. I
needed pictures because I was so scared. It took my mind off it.
PDN: Are technical issues important to you?
Day: I use a Hasselblad medium format—I’ve been using it for
six months. Before that I used a Pentax for many years; my assistant suggested
I try the Hasselblad. I like it because it’s clearer, but the thing I don’t
like is the gravelly focus. But I have to say I’m not crazy about cameras. I’m
not one of these people who like to talk cameras. I like to make a picture.
PDN: What else have you got coming up?
Day: I recently shot the Hermes catalogue, which I really
enjoyed. It was really good fun to take these very classic clothes and show
them in a non-classic way.
French Penthouse recently asked me to work for them, and
hopefully it will happen. I’ve got a few girls lined up. I shot [model]
Rosemary Ferguson
for Penthouse. I met the editor at a Vivienne Westwood party and he asked if
I’d like to do it. I thought, “That would be fantastic!” It was a title I’d
never thought of working for, but there was no doubt in my mind. I do like to
photograph girls quite naked, because it’s more natural.
I’ve also been doing some film work, and I’ve been asked to
do a perfume commercial. I love film. Moving images are very different to
stills, but I’ve always directed people and in fashion shoots you’re always
telling little stories.
Something very strange happened to the terminally ill
fashion photographer, Corrine Day as she came closer to death.
She discovered glamour. Looking back, it's quite a shocking
transformation. Shocking but inevitable at the same time. As Day's life drew to
a close, her fashion photographs no longer dealt with the grubby realism of
run-down tenements and the strange but fascinating ways of the inhabitants.
Most probably she no longer wanted to look at that kind of thing. Almost
overnight, rawness was replaced with refinement. It was a natural evolution.
Suffering the torture of a brain tumour – defiantly she had
almost every grisly detail documented – was enough reality for Corrine Day. She
turned her eyes to elegance. Her most recent work, fittingly entitled
"Golden Years" for the October 2007 edition of British Vogue could
easily have been taken by Horst. That's how accomplished, refined and
breathtakingly beautiful this portfolio of photographs was.
Everyone who is anyone in fashion, and beyond, will know
Day's legacy, her former celluloid signature: dirty, wasted, fresh, innocent,
real. Council houses, not couture ateliers, were her natural domain. Day was an
accidental photographer, an international glamour model with no formal
training, but a faultless instinct which she followed until the day she died.
Bored out of her mind, waiting for shots to be set up, Day picked up a camera
and started to snap the scenes around her. When she was asked by The Face to
come up with some fashion shots she trawled through the look books of the London hopefuls and came
across a 15-year-old waif from Croydon called Kate Moss. It was a natural
pairing, one that was to prove unbelievably fruitful for both. They were
kindred spirits, two Cockney adventurers who fancied a mad day out. "I
thought. She's like me," Day recalled years later. "She was cheeky,
and I really liked that."
The snaps taken on Camber Sands were sublime in their
innocence. Moss was running around in a feathered headdress and shod in
Birkenstock sandals. "I was just having a laugh," Moss remembered.
"Corinne just wanted to bring out everything I hated when I was 15. My bow
legs, the mole on my breast, the way I laughed."
This daft adventure, which ended up being featured in the
Third Summer of Love editorial for The Face in 1990, propelled both Day and
Moss into fashion wonderland. It was a seminal moment, later to become a
photographic exhibition at Gimpel Fils entitled simply "Fifteen".
They both became world famous, and neither of them were ever to look back.
Day became the uncrowned queen of a new trend. The media
gave it a name: Heroin Chic. After The Face came the call from Vogue. In 1993,
the new editor, Alexandra Shulman, formerly of GQ, wanted to add some reality
to the proceedings. She had a quest to inject more affordable, high street
clothes into the magazine and commissioned Day. So the portals of Condé Nast
saw something they hadn't entertained before: grubby carpets, visible pubic
hair, American tan tights, a PVC sofa and a bare radiator. The model, Moss,
looked bleakly into space. The New York Times described her look as "very
young and very dead".
It did, of course, cause controversy; some may say of the
wrong kind. Susie Orbach, a staunch feminist, said they were "just this
side of porn", while the Cosmpolitan editor Marcelle D'Argy Smith called
them "hideous and tragic". In truth, the trend, also referred to as
"dirty realism", jarred the flow of the Vogue fashion pages and
looked utterly out of place.
Following her diagnosis of a brain tumour in 1996, Day
turned the camera on herself. Even in periods of prolonged, intense pain and
incredible distress she asked for her surgery journey to be recorded. In 2000
she staged an exhibition at the Photographer's Gallery simply entitled
"Diary". It was an intermittent photographic record of herself and
everyone around her. By then she was extremely ill and was acutely aware of the
value of friendship. In a nutshell: the people around her were pulling her
through. "Good friends make you face the truth about yourself," she
said, "and you do the same to them, as painful or as pleasurable as that
is." She held an exhibition which celebrated the life-enhancing qualilties
of friendship, epitomised by Tara, her best friend.
Corrine Day's legacy is her honesty, the turnaround in her
style a natural consequence of what she was going through. "Fashion
photography has always been about fantasy," she said. "I wanted to
take it in the opposite direction." Later, in the exquisite Golden Years
shoot, her final curtain call for British Vogue, it is telling that one of her
most beautiful shots is of a model, wearing a curvaceous black evening dress
standing on the platform of the London tube. Chiffon is flying. The train is
speeding past, leaving the station.
Corinne Day, model and photographer: born 19 February 1962;
partner to Mark Szaszy; died 27 August 2010.
Was Kate Moss exploited as a young model?
In 1990 she was just 16 when a nude photoshoot launched her
career. But it wasn't a happy time, says the supermodel
Kate Moss poses nude in 1992, two years after the topless
photoshoot that launched her career. Photograph: Alamy
She is laughing, but the body language couldn't be clearer –
Kate Moss covers her bare
breasts with an arm, and hunches over, trying to conceal the rest of her naked
body with a sunhat. The photograph, one of a series taken by
Corinne Day that also
included a topless photograph, appeared in the Face magazine in 1990 and
launched Moss's career, though two decades on she does not remember the shoot
as a happy one.
"I see a 16-year-old now, and to ask her to take her
clothes off would feel really weird," she says in an
interview with Vanity Fair. "But they were like: If you don't
do it, then we're not going to book you again. So I'd lock myself in the toilet
and cry and then come out and do it. I never felt very comfortable about
it."
Moss also tells the magazine that she sought medical help
for anxiety two years later. "Nobody takes care of you mentally. There's a
massive pressure to do what you have to do."
This happened 20 years ago – and Moss, of course, went on to
have a phenomenally successful career, becoming one of the most powerful
models, and remained close to Day.
Other models, though, say the industry is not much different
now. "Nothing has really changed," says Victoria Keon-Cohen, a model
and founding chair of Equity's Models' Committee, which now has around 800
members. "Until we started the union there wasn't any recognition of
this kind of treatment in the industry. We wanted to help young models assert
themselves and understand what rights they have. Unfortunately what Kate is
talking about does still happen and has happened to me."
"It is not uncommon for models who are children to be
asked to take nude or semi-nude photos," agrees Sara Ziff. "I started
modelling at 14 and there were several occasions where I was put on the spot to
take topless photos."
Ziff
founded the Model Alliance union in the US to set standards, and doesn't
think "significant change is going to happen until there are laws that
protect child models in the way other child performers are protected". In
a previous interview, she described how, when a 16-year-old model complained
that a 45-year-old photographer had propositioned her, "her agency said
she should have slept with him".
But as Moss's comments show, it isn't only predatory men who
are the problem, but a blurring between sexual imagery and
fashion, and the models who have
to negotiate it are often young – and fear speaking out.
For any model worried about their career, the pressure to
keep quiet is strong enough, she says, "And then you've got girls from
eastern Europe who are responsible for supporting their families."
"There will always be horror stories, but I think it's
a less frequent occurrence now because I think everyone is much more aware of
[models' wellbeing]," says Rosie Vogel, bookings editor at Vogue.
"These younger girls often have chaperones - their agent would be
there." Vogue's minimum age limit for models is 16. "Not everyone has
the ethics that we do, and you can't police everyone. There will be people who
will exploit girls but hopefully it's getting better. A lot of the girls are
more outspoken and they're not as afraid to say they are not comfortable."
Do agencies do enough to support their models? (Storm,
Moss's agency since she started, didn't respond for this piece). "Some do
look after their girls, but they are a business and they have a lot of models
to take care of so it is very difficult to make sure the support is
consistently there. That's another reason we started – so models can have their
own access to counsellors and a support network. It is improving but it's a long
road," says Keon-Cohen
Kate Moss photographed in Borneo
by Corinne Day. Photograph courtesy of the estate of Corinne Day and Gimpel
fils
Corinne Day
THE FACE
Gimpel Fils,
London
W1K 4NB
Starts 1 September
Until 1 October
While her famous shot of
16-year-old Moss wrinkling her nose in a feathery headdress was
actually the second time the model had been on the cover of the style mag (
the first time was two months earlier – improbably, an Italia 90
special), Day's photographs seemed to sum up a new era. The early 90s was a
time of hedonism, hope, and change: repressive regimes around Europe were
toppled, the
Berlin
wall came down, and
rave culture seemed to offer young clubbers a glimpse of a utopian
society.
The photographs in
this small exhibition, not featuring that cover shot but mainly
culled from two 1991 Face fashion stories, recapture that feeling of optimism:
of a coming generation deciding to do things their way. Instead of the
imperious busty glamazon you'd find in an 80s fashion shoot, you have Moss.
With lank hair, no make-up and wearing what look at this
20-year distance to be charity shop finds (scuffed boots, tatty jumpers), she's
beautiful but fresh and real: recognisably a girl from Croydon. In a series of
pictures taken in
Borneo, she seems barely
older than the local kids. One shot sees her leading a grinning young boy whose
face is surrounded by the petals of a giant paper flower, like
Barry Mooncult, dancer with early 90s band
Flowered Up . In another, she's posed in a tropical location, but
wearing a floppy hat and clutching a bottle of beer, more Club 18-30 than Condé
Nast Travel.
Day's pictures junk the materialistic trappings of the 80s.
Instead of glossy aspiration, she celebrates the ordinary – cracks in the wall,
Rizlas on the floor, the grotty carpets immediately recognisable to anyone
who's ever lived in rented accommodation. Out go big hair and shoulder pads: in
come drainpipe jeans and secondhand shirts (not yet described as
"vintage"). A picture of a young man lying topless by a lake as the
sun goes down foregrounds the litter, gravel and muddy patches that earlier
fashion photographers would have been at pains to remove.
Moss has been so omnipresent over the years that looking at
old pictures of her is inevitably a nostalgic experience. A series of
2007
close-ups allows us to compare then and now, although she seems to have
escaped with only a few wrinkles in these passport-photo-like shots. (A Juergen
Teller shoot in Self Service magazine last year was far more brutal.) The real
novelty is seeing close-ups of her talking, since she utters so few words in
public.
While Day's aesthetic – of finding beauty in the mundane –
soon became commodified by brands such as
Calvin Klein,
these pictures still have a tangible idealism which is bittersweet in
hindsight. Their mood is summed up in the slogan of a brooch Moss is wearing in
a couple of pictures. It reads "Heaven is real".
In her early work, Corinne Day candidly documented the
private codes and rituals of those around her. Often using her Soho flat (above the former Dazed office in Brewer
St) as a backdrop, she shot struggling models sprawled out on her sofa and
friends in hazy comedowns. These photos, taken between 1987 and 1996,
reveal both the counterculture spirit of post-rave 90s youth and the darker
side of the fashion world, and are now being celebrated in May the Circle
Remain Unbroken, an exhibition and book by Day’s husband, Mark Szaszy, and her
friend and muse Tara St Hill.
It’s now just over three years since her death. For Szaszy,
going through her archive has been difficult. “There were times when Tara and I
would both be struck down by a wave of sadness and we had to get up and walk
away,” he says. Here, Szaszy shares personal memories of three early
works.
Corinne Day's photographs influenced a generation of fashion
and documentary image makers. Her pictures unflinchingly documented her life
and relationships with a realist snapshot aesthetic-representing a youth
culture set against the glamour of fashion and avoiding fictionalisation or
voyeurism. Gaining notoriety both for a scandalous photo of Kate Moss in Vogue
in 1993 and for pioneering so-called 'grunge' fashion photography, for a time
she was exiled from the mainstream fashion media. Corinne later returned to the
fashion and art world with works exhibited and collected in galleries and
museums worldwide. Corinne Day died in August 2010, and in her first book
since, we celebrate this icon of photography with a series of previously
un-published early works.
Included are texts by Charlotte Cotton & Glenn O'Brien
Cover fonts are desgined by Pablo Ferro
Photographer Corinne Day's raw images, including the candids
of Kate Moss sprawled across their rented Notting Hill flat in mismatched
underwear, define the 1990s. Her iconic The Face shoot with a 15-year-old
freckly Moss in a feather headdress ushered in a new rebellious style which
came to be known as 'grunge,' as well as launching Kate's career.
A new retrospective, named after one of her favourite songs
‘May the Circle Remain Unbroken,’ which honours the late photographer opened
this week at Gimpel Fils gallery. The exhibition and accompanying book focuses
on her early work, with previously unseen photographs taken between 1987 and
1996.
The exhibition was carefully edited by her husband,
film-maker Mark Szaszy along with Jackie Haliday from Gimpel Fils gallery,
publisher Aron Morel, Corinne’s best friend Tara St Hill and her former
agent Susie Babchick. The collection focuses on spontaneous snap shots of
Corinne's friends, taken in their Soho flat,
with the aim of showing 'the friendships that formed over 20 years ago and
continue to endure three years after her passing.' A series of music videos
created by Szaszy will also be shown alongside Corinne's photographs.
Corinne Day, who died in August 2010 after suffering with
cancer for a decade, is known for her documentary-style photography. As Day
said 'photography is getting as close as you can to real life, showing us
things we don't normally see. These are people's most intimate moments, and
sometimes intimacy is sad'. The photographer is credited with launching Kate
Moss' glittering career, as she endlessly shot candid pictures of Kate when
they lived together in Day's Soho flat.
Volt Café: How did you first meet Corinne Day?
Tara St Hill: My boyfriend met her at Tooting Bec Lido. She wanted to shoot
him. I wasn’t keen initially! But when I discovered she’d worked for The Face I
relented. We went to her flat in Brewer
Street. She was wearing this epic long denim
skirt, cap sleeved tee and battered adidas. I just knew I had to get a skirt
like it! We really hit it off and she did several shoots with my boyfriend.
VC: What did you do for a living at the time?
TSH: I was working as a runner on The Word, nothing serious. Corinne and I
started shopping together and I started making stuff for shoots. Mark (Szaszy,
Day’s boyfriend) suggested I should become a stylist. It was exciting times,
Oasis was happening, Mark had shot their video, which I worked on. We
discovered Ray-Gun magazine, who were great, they gave us absolute freedom. Her
work was so fresh. She was my best friend.
VC: Was it very difficult to edit the images for the book
with Mark?
TSH: Very. Some days we just had to leave it, it was too emotional. I don’t
think either of us could have done it on our own. It felt like a gift. But
doing this book was an opportunity to show it wasn’t all darkness, there was
lots of light and laughter, too. I wanted to show the whole picture. She edited
her work to only show the dark, I wanted to show it all.
VC: Would you say she was attracted to the dark side? That
in a way, that was considered more ‘interesting’ to an audience?
TSH: I think so. She was attracted to the dark side but also very cautious.
Some people are natural caners but she always held back. She was never really
into drugs although she was around people who used a lot of drugs.
VC: Were any pictures excluded because they were too
personal?
TSH: No. They just needed a reason to be in there. To be less like someone’s
personal story and more like a documentary. People want to see her work. We had
to think ‘what would Corinne have done’? My gauge was, would she have published
it? I had to fight for some images – like the one of the little girl on the
floor. The publishers were against including it but I remember Corinne always
had that image in her flat, she loved it and it was one that very important to
her. I hope the book comes across as one that was made by people who loved each
other – not overly personal in a cheesy way.
VC: The images she took of you and the people around you
look so effortless, so uncontrived. How aware were you of her shooting?
TSH: Never felt like you were ‘on camera’, it was just Corinne. I mean, if I
felt she was annoying me shooting, I’d tell her to stop. But it never really
felt intrusive, never felt like she was getting in your way. When we edited, it
was strange to see the evening unfold in the pictures. She loved the fleeting
moment. She’d spend hours getting the shot. So patient. She’d sit there and sit
there and sit there! We tried to show that in the book – the 6 – 7 shots that
led to THE SHOT. I wanted people to see the process.
VC: Were you conscious of her fame and her working
relationship and friendship with Kate Moss?
TSH: We shot Kate for her first book. Kate’s a big girl. I remember the first
time I met Kate. Corinne was a funny one. The flat in Brewer Street was such a communal point,
you’d be sitting on her sofa smoking a spliff and Jason Donovan would be
dropping by to return a video he’d borrowed.
VC: Five words to sum up Corinne?
TSH: Her work doesn’t need words – it just stands on its own. Five words for
Corinne would be Really Loving, Loyal, Passionate, Meticulous and Fun. She was
fun, different. She was a really good friend. I have moments where I think
we’ll never go shopping again or on holiday. Often think how I’d love to call
her up right now. When she died she left such a huge hole. Also workwise. I’ve
not found anyone to replace her in my work. We bounced off each other. We were
really lucky like that.
VC: What do you think Corinne would have been like as a
pensioner?
TSH: She’d still be working, shooting, making books. She’d never have stopped.
It was something she needed to do. She needed the world to see the beauty in
the little details.
For those keen to reacquaint themselves Day’s work, the
current exhibition at Gimpel Fils May the Circle Remain Unbroken shows the
people that Day’s work brought together and the friendships that formed over 20
years ago and continue to endure three years after her passing. It also
illuminates Day’s pioneering approach to photography where the boundaries are
blurred to the extent that it is impossible to dissect the constructed from
real. Day and long term partner Mark Szaszy’s Brewer Street flat often doubled as a set
where friends, models and muses all overlapped. In addition to the photographs,
a series of music videos by Szaszy will be screened bringing to life the
protagonists in Day’s work.
Accompanying the exhibition is a new publication of the same
name by Morel Books. Edited by Mark Szaszy and Tara St Hill, this book
documents Day’s progress from the early to mid nineties and stands as the first
work since Diary.
May the Circle Remain Unbroken
Gimpel Fils
30
Davies Street
London W1K 4NB
Words by Anna Bang
The Eighties, the decade that fed us the creed of “greed is
good”, spawned the fashion “glamazon”. She had supergloss looks and a full
décolletage, and, naturally, she wouldn’t get out of bed for less than 10K. In
the Nineties, the decade that ushered in grunge and Cool Britannia, an entirely
different creature emerged. She was very young, very skinny, and had a look that
somehow combined the exquisitely ethereal and the very ordinary. She came in
the gamine shape of Kate Moss. Corinne Day is credited with creating her look
and of
changing
the face of fashion.
Day, who sadly died of a brain tumour in August 2010, became
both a celebrated and a controversial figure. She did achingly cool fashion
shoots for magazines that were part of a new youth culture. But much of the
mainstream press blamed her for promoting anorexia and “heroin chic”.
But the pictures below, which can be seen in a small
exhibition at London's
Gimpel Fils Gallery, tell a rather different story. In them, Moss embodies a
lively, lovely spirit of girlish innocence. She also looks recognisably like a
girl from Croydon. The exhibition focuses on two 1991 fashion stories from The
Face magazine: "Heaven is Real" and "Borneo".
In the first, Day evoked the intense joys of teenage female friendship, while
the second feels like a series of beautifully composed holiday snaps: Moss is
seen wandering down the road in flip-flops, wearing a snorkel and making
friends with the local kids.
The gallery below (and the exhibition) also features playful
images from other shoots, including those with Michael "flea" Balzary
from
Red Hot
Chili Peppers.
Corinne Day, Photographer of Kate Moss, Is Dead
Published: September 1, 2010
Corinne Day, whose frank, unadorned photos of a
teenage
Kate Moss in the early 1990s helped inaugurate
a new era of gritty realism in fashion photography that came to be called
“grunge,” died Friday at her home in Denham, a village in
Buckinghamshire, England.
Dafydd Jones/WireImage
Kate Moss, left, and Corinne Day at the National Portrait
Gallery in London
in 2007.
The cause was a cancerous brain tumor, said her agent, Susan
Babchick. According to her Web site, Ms. Day was 45, but public records
indicate she was 48.
Ms. Day’s passion to record the most profound human
experiences with a camera was never more evident than the day in 1996 when the
tumor was discovered after she had collapsed in New York. She promptly asked her husband to
shoot pictures of her, and they continued the project through her treatment and
decline.
“Photography is getting as close as you can to real life,”
she said, “showing us things we don’t normally see. These are people’s most
intimate moments, and sometimes intimacy is sad.”
Ms. Day built her reputation on unrelenting visual honesty.
She refused to airbrush the bags from under models’ eyes or de-emphasize their
knobby knees. She eschewed pretty locations or even studios in favor of
shooting people in their own environments.
It added up to a startling detour from the glossy world of
supermodels — “subversion,” in Ms. Day’s own phrase.
There were two defining moments along the way, both
involving Ms. Moss. The first was in 1990, when some of
the first published fashion photographs
of Ms. Moss, taken by Ms. Day, appeared in the British magazine The Face.
One showed Ms. Moss topless; another suggested she was naked. She wore a mix of
designer and secondhand clothes and no makeup over her freckles, and her
expression was sincere. The photos seemed to usher in a new age of anti-fashion
style. Artlessness became art. Some called it “grunge.”
The second moment, in 1993, was a shoot for British Vogue
that featured a pale and skinny Ms. Moss in mismatched underwear. A public
outcry ensued, as some claimed that Ms. Moss’s waifish figure seemed to imply
she was suffering from an eating disorder or drug addiction.
On her agent’s advice, Ms. Moss stopped working with Ms.
Day, with whom she had become close friends. Ms. Day said she was tired of
taking fashion pictures, anyway.
“I think fashion magazines are horrible,” she said in an
interview with the British newspaper The Observer in 1995. “They’re stale and
they say the same thing year in and year out.”
The grunge aesthetic took hold for several years in designer
imagery of the 1990s, most visibly in Calvin Klein’s influential fragrance and
jeans campaigns, and also in street fashion, with the throwaway style of
flannel shirts and distressed jeans, as popularized by
Kurt Cobain and the burgeoning
Seattle music scene.
Ms. Day eventually took fashion photos again, including ones
of Ms. Moss that are in the permanent collection of the
National Portrait
Gallery in London. But her aspiration was to document the lives of the
people she knew best, and her
“Diary,”
published in 2000, told visual stories, including those of a single mother
struggling to survive.
Corinne Day was born in Ealing, a town in west London. She said that her
mother had run a brothel and that her father had robbed banks. They divorced
when she was 5, and her grandmother raised her. As a girl, she said, she liked
to spend hours in the photo booth at Woolworth’s with her friends.
Ms. Day left school at 16, worked briefly as a trainee in a
bank, then flew around the world as an airline courier. A photographer she met
on a plane suggested that she take up modeling, and she did, for Guess Jeans.
In Japan
she met a filmmaker, Mark Szaszy, who taught her to use a camera — they would
later marry — and she began taking pictures of the drab private lives of her
fellow models, who seemed so glamorous in public.
“There was a lot of sadness,” she said in an interview with
The Guardian in 2000. “We couldn’t buy the clothes we were photographed in,
couldn’t go out and do the things we would have liked to do as teenagers.”
She took her work to the art director at The Face, who asked
her to shoot some fashion pictures. She prowled the modeling agencies with a
Polaroid and found Ms. Moss, whom she likened to “the girl next door.” They
lived, worked and prospered together for three years.
“Corinne’s pictures, you might say, made Kate, and Kate made
Corinne’s reputation,” The Evening Standard said in 2007.
Ms. Day is survived by her husband as well as her parents
and two brothers.
Even at the height of her celebrity, in 1993, Ms. Day told
The Guardian that her personal sartorial goal was to look “unstyled.”
“I don’t take fashion too seriously,” she said.
This article has been revised to reflect the following
correction:
Correction: September 1, 2010
An earlier version of this article gave Ms. Day's age as 45,
but public records indicate it was 48.
'I'm a photography junkie'
Corinne Day was
the world's hottest fashion photographer. Then she was vilified for a picture
of Kate Moss, got into drugs, and suffered a brain tumour. Her new book of
photographs lays her life bare
3 September 2000
In 1996, the photographer Corinne
Day collapsed in her apartment in New
York and had a seizure. Her flatmate called the
paramedics, and when she regained consciousness, she immediately asked him to
bring her camera into the ambulance to record it all. Not the first instinct
most of us would have in the circumstances, but then Day has never claimed to
be ordinary. 'The camera becomes a part of your life,' she says
matter-of-factly. 'I'm a photography junkie. I'm just driven. I don't know
why.'
And so it is, in her new book
Diary, that you can see Day lying in a bed in Belvue hospital looking
frightened and confused seconds after being told she had a brain tumour. You
can see the needle being pushed into her forehead just before the operation to
remove it, and you see her looking terrified in the lift going down to the
theatre. These pictures were taken by her boyfriend of 13 years, Mark Szaszy,
who says it was hard to do because his hands were shaking with emotion. 'But I
knew if I did it, it would take her mind off what was happening.'
Diary consists of 100 photographs
taken over a 10-year period, a raw, unflinching look at the lives of Day and
her friends. It's a high-quality art book, beautifully presented, but most of
the images make uncomfortable viewing. Some are painfully intimate, some
unbearably sad, many focusing around Tara St Hill, a single mother in her early
twenties, struggling to bring up her baby daughter with little money and the
pain of Crohn's Disease.
Nothing is taboo, too private to
show in this book. There's a picture of Day pretending to masturbate. Another
shows her bloody knickers. We see Day and her friends taking drugs, having
parties, in the bath, injured after accidents and fights. We see Tara pregnant,
Tara crying, Tara having sex, Tara on the loo.
'To me, photography is about showing us things that we don't normally see,'
explains Day. 'Getting as close as you can to real life. What I found
interesting was to capture people's most intimate moments. And sometimes
intimacy is sad. In photos, we're usually laughing and happy and having a good
time. We don't normally see the other side, when we're not having such a good
time.'
Corrine Day has always been
unconventional. She was bought up by her nan in the village
of Ickenham just to the west of London. Her mother, she
claims, ran a brothel. Her father was 'in and out of trouble' in his youth,
then busy building a legitimate business empire. He wasn't that interested in
kids, and she didn't really get to know him until she was older. It was his
obsession with money, she says, that made her so indifferent to it. 'My dad was
incredibly driven by money, and I felt like I lost him to it. When I was a kid
he had a big house, but I hated going there. It never felt like home. There was
no love there.'
'Too busy being naughty' to learn
much at school, she earned a meagre living afterwards flying round the world as
a courier. A photographer she met on a plane suggested she take up modelling,
and although she was considered short at 5ft 6in, she did a lot of catalogue
work, living in Japan for a while - where she met Mark Szaszy - and then in LA.
It was the mid-Eighties, when glamour was compulsory, but Day's face didn't
take the required layers of make-up too well.
'I don't have great cheekbones,
or huge lips to pile lipstick on - it didn't suit me. I wasn't really a
conventional beauty, I was quite plain-looking for a model. When I first saw
Christy Turlington, all my hopes of ever getting on the cover of Vogue were
gone. So I just made the best of it, and enjoyed it - I loved the travelling.
We went to Australia, Spain, and ended up in Milan. That's where I started to take
pictures. Mark had a camera, and he taught me how to use it.'
Her subjects were other
struggling models, photographed in their own clothes in the seedy hostels where
they lived. 'I started to realise that it was ambiguous, the life. Even though
you're surrounded by all this glamour, there was a lot of sadness. We couldn't
buy the clothes that we were photographed in, couldn't afford to go out and do
the things we would have liked to do as teenagers.'
She took her work to The Face's
art director Phil Bicker, who was opening up the magazine to a new generation
of young, innovative talent at the end of the Eighties. Bicker asked her to
shoot some fashion pictures, but having been away from England for
five years, she had no contacts with models. So she trawled the London agencies looking
for new talent, eventually spotting a Polaroid of a teenager from Croydon. At
14, Kate Moss was 10 years younger than Day, but they connected almost
instantly.
'She was a beauty, but there was
also something quite ordinary about her: her hair was a bit scraggy, and with
no make-up she just looked like the girl next door. I encouraged her to be
natural. I'd chat to her and then take the pictures in the middle of the
conversation. I was trying to get the person to just bring themselves to the
camera.'
Bicker made Kate Moss the face of
The Face, and Day's best images of her summed up the mood of British youth
after the rave explosion. But Moss and her agency weren't always happy with the
pictures. Moss got teased at school for exposing her flat chest in one classic
1990 shoot, and the agency worried that the photographer deliberately left in
imperfections like bags under the eyes that others would have retouched. But
for Day, this was the point. 'It was something I just felt so deep inside,
being a model and hating the way I was made up. The photographer always made me
into someone I wasn't. I wanted to go in the opposite direction.'
Working with stylist Melanie
Ward, Day and a handful of other photographers such as David Sims began using
second-hand clothes and ungroomed, unconventional-looking models discovered in
the street. The look they pioneered began to take off, christened 'waif' at
first, then merging seamlessly with the US grunge scene. At the Paris shows, Ward and Day
would laugh to see the second-hand clothes they'd shot six months before being
imitated on the catwalk.
But Day was ambivalent about her
growing success. She photographed the couture collections for Vogue, but hated
it. She did a shoot with Linda Evangelista, and found it pointless. 'She just
didn't excite me. Photographing someone you don't know and never plan to see
again is so impersonal. The photograph means nothing. When Kate and I did our
first Vogue cover, that was exciting.'
As the look was assimilated into
the mainstream, so were the group who created it. Kate Moss signed to Calvin
Klein. Melanie Ward moved to New York
to work for Harper's Bazaar. The photographers Day had come up with became the
new stars of the fashion world, shooting big-budget advertising campaigns.
Unimpressed by money or fame, Day instead became increasingly drawn to the kind
of documentary art photographs taken by Nan Goldin.
By 1993, she had alienated almost
everyone she worked with - although she would probably say that they all let
her down. She shot a sad-looking Kate Moss for Vogue wearing cheap undies,
baggy tights and no make-up. Published during the summer lull when all news is
gratefully pounced upon by the media, the story provoked outrage, with claims
that it was promoting anorexia, drugs, even paedophilia. It was the end of her
relationship with Vogue, and, for a while, with Moss.
Corinne Day met Tara St Hill in 1991
and began photographing her and her boyfriend. By 1993, they were all involved
with a dark, heavy British rock band called Pusherman, and as Day's fashion
family fell apart, she replaced it instead with this new gang of friends.
Everyone partied and took drugs - cannabis, ketamine, heroin - although Day
says she never developed a habit. 'I never liked heroin that much. It's a very
overrated drug.'
The pictures she took over the
next four years form the basis of Diary, and publishing them seems to have
freed her to move on. Day and Szaszy haven't done drugs for over a year. He's
making a documentary about her work. She's starting to take fashion pictures
again. She did a shoot for Vogue recently, working with Kate Moss for the first
time in seven years. It was fun, she says, like no time had passed at all.
She's shooting for the magazines now, not for herself.
'My attitude is more
businesslike, not so aggressive. I'm keeping within the boundaries. It's
interesting - I've actually come to a point in my life where I want to make
money.' She laughs. 'I've realised that it can be quite useful.'
She and Szaszy want a dog now. A
house with a garden, possibly in LA. And then maybe children. The last shot in
Diary shows a beautiful, palm-fringed beach littered with tin cans. It's a
metaphor, she says, for the whole book. If there's a message she wants the
viewer to take away, it is that life can be beautiful, and yet it's also
fragile, and we often trash it. 'We don't realise how precious it is.'
• Corinne Day's work is on show
at the Photographer's Gallery in London, 5 Oct
to 26 Nov, and at Gimpel Fils in London,
6 Oct to 17 Nov. Diary is published next month by Kruse Verlag. Imperfect
Beauty, a collection of pictures by the generation of photographers, stylists
and art directors who came through in the early Nineties, includes Corinne Day
and is published by V&A Books this month, with an exhibition at the V&A
museum. To order Diary for £33.50 or Imperfect Beauty for £20.95, plus 99p
p&p each, call Observer CultureShop on
Erika Wall on
Corinne Day: 'She made me realise it’s OK to be me.' Photograph: Rex Features
I think we models have a very
different view of her – a lot of people have said she was stubborn and
difficult to work with and I was really surprised because I never noticed that
at all. It might be because she liked to shoot girls the way they were, to
capture the person.
I met her on 18 December 1999
when I was 19 and I didn't want to be a model any more because I felt the
industry was really harsh, they just saw you like a doll and wanted to dress
you up. And the first shoot I did with her was in her flat in Soho, the stylist
turned up with the clothes in a binbag and it took about 10 minutes and then we
went to the pub – I wasn't used to that. She was so quick when she shot because
she knew what she wanted. She was really relaxed about it, she wouldn't really
give directions she would just say, 'Go and stand there, that looks beautiful'
– and then start shooting.
I used to have really bad acne
when I started modelling and she told me, 'I like your spots, it's you'. She
saw beauty in people's flaws – she really saw the natural side of people. Most
models were bullied at school, we were mostly really skinny and it's not cool
to be skinny, back then it was the ugliest thing you could be. So you're really
unpopular at school and then all of a sudden you're a bit popular and guys are
coming up to you but you still have this anxious thing about your looks.
A lot of the early jobs I did
used a lot of makeup and clothes and were quite sexy – but Corinne saw beauty
in natural girls. The first pictures she did of me in i-D you can actually see
my acne in the pictures. She made me realise it's OK to be me, she gave me a
whole different way of seeing the whole business. She is the reason I kept on
doing it and I'm so thankful to her. She liked me and kept on booking me over
and over again.
She was so respectful, she had a
small voice and she was really calm and gentle, she was never harsh with models
and never gave you a hard time. I've seen her in arguments with stylists when
she'd say, 'I want her in own clothes', and the stylist would say the models
have to wear Prada but she'd say no. She shot me in my own clothes so many
times – it's not the ideal business for the magazines, but she wanted me as I
was.
I've started to take pictures
myself now. She's been such an inspiration in not having any fear whatsoever
and seeing the person, taking pictures of the actual person – not trying to
dress them up as something they're not, not being so obsessed with classical
beauty.
Sandy Nairne, curator
"When I commissioned a
portrait from Corinne Day for the National Portrait Gallery I wondered if she
might tackle someone from a different world – a politician, philosopher or
sportsperson – but she wanted to do Kate Moss in a different way. She then
produced this brilliant, intimate, multi-part portrait of Kate at home, only
possible because of their long and close relationship."
Mario Testino,
photographer
"The first time I saw Kate
Moss was in a picture by Corinne Day. She was a little girl in all her
innocence, laughing away. I bought this image in a charity auction and it has
lived with me ever since. Corinne brought a fresh approach to the fashion business. It was daring
and gutsy – and effective. It caught your eye and made you feel it was OK to be
honest. She, like few others, took fashion photography to new heights.
Jefferson Hack, magazine editor
"One of our first offices for Dazed and Confused was in Brewer Street in a
one-bedroom apartment below Corinne's flat. We would meet all the time and she
became a really strong influence. She was a purist who refused to play the
fashion game. In the late 90s she consciously pulled away from the industry to
focus on her personal documentary work – she was shooting friends and young
families she knew well. Her work was free from judgment or sentimentality but
never far from controversy. Influenced by the likes of Larry Clarke and Nan
Goldin, she was part of a new wave of artists whose sincere way of reframing
dark and often shunned aspects of society quickly influenced the wider
culture."
Rankin, photographer
"It would have been impossible to be a photographer in the last 20
years and not be touched or influenced by Corinne Day's images. She was an
artist of true vision and integrity. From her first shots of Kate Moss for the
Face magazine through to her amazing book and the work for Vogue recently, her
photographs were challenging, beautiful and inspirational. Her death is a sad
loss to the world of image-making, and art as a whole."
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/sep/02/corinne-day-face-photography-review
Corinne Day, who
died last August, will be remembered for transforming
fashion with her pictures of the young
Kate Moss for the Face.
While her famous shot of
16-year-old Moss wrinkling her nose in a feathery headdress was actually the second time the model had been on the cover of the style mag (
the first time was two months earlier – improbably, an Italia 90 special), Day's photographs seemed to sum up a new era. The early 90s was a time of hedonism, hope, and change: repressive regimes around Europe were toppled, the Berlin wall came down, and
rave culture seemed to offer young clubbers a glimpse of a utopian society.
The photographs in
this small exhibition, not featuring that cover shot but mainly culled from two 1991 Face fashion stories, recapture that feeling of optimism: of a coming generation deciding to do things their way. Instead of the imperious busty glamazon you'd find in an 80s fashion shoot, you have Moss.
With lank hair, no make-up and wearing what look at this 20-year distance to be charity shop finds (scuffed boots, tatty jumpers), she's beautiful but fresh and real: recognisably a girl from Croydon. In a series of pictures taken in Borneo, she seems barely older than the local kids. One shot sees her leading a grinning young boy whose face is surrounded by the petals of a giant paper flower, like
Barry Mooncult, dancer with early 90s band
Flowered Up . In another, she's posed in a tropical location, but wearing a floppy hat and clutching a bottle of beer, more Club 18-30 than Condé Nast Travel.
Day's pictures junk the materialistic trappings of the 80s. Instead of glossy aspiration, she celebrates the ordinary – cracks in the wall, Rizlas on the floor, the grotty carpets immediately recognisable to anyone who's ever lived in rented accommodation. Out go big hair and shoulder pads: in come drainpipe jeans and secondhand shirts (not yet described as "vintage"). A picture of a young man lying topless by a lake as the sun goes down foregrounds the litter, gravel and muddy patches that earlier fashion photographers would have been at pains to remove.
Moss has been so omnipresent over the years that looking at old pictures of her is inevitably a nostalgic experience. A series of
2007 close-ups allows us to compare then and now, although she seems to have escaped with only a few wrinkles in these passport-photo-like shots. (A Juergen Teller shoot in Self Service magazine last year was far more brutal.) The real novelty is seeing close-ups of her talking, since she utters so few words in public.
While Day's aesthetic – of finding beauty in the mundane – soon became commodified by brands such as
Calvin Klein, these pictures still have a tangible idealism which is bittersweet in hindsight. Their mood is summed up in the slogan of a brooch Moss is wearing in a couple of pictures. It reads "Heaven is real".
http://www.corinneday.co.uk/press.php?id=5&action=read
This is from Day's own website - and includes shed loads of classic lines about the shock aspect of the images.
http://i-donline.com/2011/09/the-inimitable-corinne-day/
Corinne Day, right, with Kate Moss in 2007. Photograph: Dafydd Jones/WireImage.com
It was never comfortable to look at the photographs taken by
Corinne Day, who has died aged 48 from a brain tumour. Her documentary work was plain, and plaintive. Her
fashion shots, even her recent, formally glamorous sequences for Vogue, have a sense that the girls, the gowns, the gorgeous locations are transient, and likely fake anyway. And the promise that Day had perceived in a Polaroid image of a 14-year-old aspirant model –
Kate Moss – was her potential for wistfulness. "In photos," Day said, "we're usually laughing and happy and having a good time. We don't normally see the other side, when we're not having such a good time." It was always visible through Day's lens.
Day told interviewers that her "nan" had brought her up – her portrait of her grandmother shows tough tenderness – in Ickenham, west London. She claimed her mother had run a brothel, hence, perhaps, Day's unimpressed attitude towards sex, while her tearaway father had become respectable and successfully pursued serious money, but was distant from her emotionally.
Day's first job after her failed schooldays was as a courier, catching planes around the world as casually as buses, surviving on snacks squirrelled away from inflight meals. She became a model because a photographer on a flight suggested it, but knew she was not a cover girl diva: melancholy already muted her face. Still, it was a better living – appearing in adverts in the US and Australia, and catalogues in Japan. There she met her lifetime partner Mark Szaszy, who taught her how to use his camera, which she did while modelling in Milan.
She shot what she knew: kids who wore couture on the catwalk and for the camera, but who dressed in old tat, dossed in cheap rooms and "couldn't afford to go out and do the things we would have liked to do". Fashion employed progressively younger models from the early 1960s, and by the late 80s 16-year-olds were commonplace: the sad contrast intensified between their reality and the affluent arrogance they were paid to project. Day knew her pictures were original, and Phil Bicker, the art director of The Face, recognised that her teen strays suited his magazine, and commissioned a fashion shoot. Day went round the London agencies looking for a model who reflected her images from Milan, and found her in a snap of a scraggy-haired Croydon schoolgirl, Moss.
Their first great success, the Face cover sequence The 3rd Summer of Love, was published in July 1990, with Moss, barely 16, in bits of quality ready-to-wear and Portobello market finds – and, in the two most famed images, nothing but headgear, despite the chill of Camber Sands, in East Sussex, where the shoot took place. Moss's half-combative, half-pathetic attitudes are suffused with laughter. Moss's agency, though, disliked Day's refusal to retouch the pictures. As a model, she explained, she had hated being made "into someone I wasn't. I wanted to go in the opposite direction." (She was protective enough of Moss to share a flat with her for three years.)
With the stylist Melanie Ward, Day took the aesthetic further, wrapping shaggy, sometimes druggy, youngsters dragged off the street in mismatched vintage clothes: this became the "waif look", the visual equivalent of Seattle's grunge music. Day shot Moss almost unadorned for a Vogue cover in 1993, did collections for the magazine and supermodel sittings – at first this was an ambition achieved, but she later said: "They're stale, just about sex and glamour, when there are other elements of beauty." However, she felt no thrill, not even a rebel's excitement at the outraged response to her heroin chic Underexposed Vogue sequence, with Moss in saggy tights, looking as if she were in rehab. By then, many of Day's London friends really were in rehab, or should have been. In 1991, she had taken up with a group based around a heavy rock band, Pusherman. They were into cannabis, ketamine and heroin (although Day did not always join them; drugs clouded the camera vision she valued – she was "a
photography junkie" ); they were badly off in that recessionary era.
For almost a decade, Day, influenc- ed by the documentary art of Nan Goldin, photographed their messy lives, particularly that of Tara St Hill, an impoverished, sick, single mother, shown in sex and pregnancy, in tears and tinsel, and at parties, or wasted in her Stoke Newington squat: "What I found interesting was to capture people's most intimate moments. And sometimes intimacy is sad."
Day was included in the imagery – "the camera becomes a part of your life". When she collapsed in New York in 1996, she told Szaszy, who had called the medics, not to forget her camera as he joined her in the ambulance to Bellevue hospital. His hands shook as he took the shots she requested – of her in a bed just after being told she had a brain tumour, in a lift on the way to the operating theatre for its removal – yet she felt having those moments pictured gave her control. A hundred of these images were collected in Diary, published in 2001 and much admired for its hard, but never cruel, candour.
She and Szaszy left drugs behind, and she made a pact with fashion and its finance, mellowing her visuals, even working with Moss again for Vogue. Later she accepted a National Portrait Gallery commission for a sequence of nine close-ups of Moss. Just as on Camber Sands, they chatted, so that Day could capture Moss's animation.
Day's photographs, fashion and not, were exhibited at the Victoria & Albert, Science and Design museums, Tate Modern, the Saatchi Gallery, and the Photographers' Gallery, and Szaszy spent a devoted decade making a documentary of her at work, which was shown on BBC Four in 2004.
Her tumour returned two years ago. To pay for specialised chemotherapy in a clinic in Arizona, her friends raised more than £100,000 through a Save the Day campaign, by selling limited-edition photographic prints, including a set featuring Moss, some signed by the model. Day completed the treatment last year, but it did not arrest the disease.
She is survived by Szaszy.
• Corinne Day, photographer, born 19 February 1962; died 27 August 2010
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