Corinne Day: Diary

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As August 27 2011 marks the one-year anniversary of Corinne Day’s death, next month sees Gimpel Fils gallery, Mörel Books and Whitechapel Gallery all pay homage to the legendary image-maker. Revolutionising fashion photography in the early 90s with her candid and documentary aesthetic, sensationally labelled “heroin chic”, Day is also credited with helping launch the career of her close friend Kate Moss. Causing controversy with her daring and often provocative imagery – which featured models and friends in intimate and gritty situations – Day’s photographs have become synonymous with the decade that brought about grunge, acid house and rave culture. 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. In regards to a body of work that challenges dominant cultural theory, I would like to discuss Corinne Day’s photography. She only recently gained recognition as a documentary photographer with the publication of her book called Diary in 2000. Over a period of nearly a decade she captured her friends lives, in what turned out to be an extensive project containing over one hundred images. By viewing her book, one soon realizes that Corinne Day’s work is strikingly analogous to that of Larry Clark and in particular Nan Goldin. In addition to that, the biography of Day and Goldin also read alike which inevitably leads to the question if similar experiences lead to similar forms of expression. DD: Can you tell us about Corinne’s desire to move away from typical, glamorised shoots in favour of more ‘organic’ images? What do you think her motivation to capture these types of images was? A short time later and searching among several British modeling agencies, he found Kate Moss and that was how his career, like that of the model, took off.

The terms “ heroin chic” and “ grunge fashion” were born and bandied about in the tabloids. By then, the troubled and troublesome photographer had burned too many bridges in the fashion world and, more problematically, was actually living in, and intimately photographing, a bohemian milieu defined by hard drug use. Under-exposure Alice Correia: We wanted to tell Corinne’s story from the beginning and her first job as a photographer was at “The Face”. It seemed a logical step that the focus of the exhibition would be Corinne’s early work and four photoshoots from 1991-1993 were selected. The exhibition will include images published in the magazine, while the forthcoming book “Heaven is Real” will include unpublished images from the same shoots. In the defining moments of Corinne Day's career, the so-called supermodel Kate Moss was the main protagonist and it was right there, breaking the established glamor, that the photographer established herself as the grunge side of fashion. 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.Her style of “dirty realism” was to become enormously influential within mainstream advertising. But where the imagery of nonchalant, nonconformist youth was for Day an extension of her life, in fashion the “look” returned as pure, empty style. Day started to distance herself from the high-gloss world of magazines and catwalks, but never stopped making photographs. Juergen Teller, one of Corinne Day's peers, and now the most globally successful photographer of all the young iconoclasts of that time, concurs. "I loved Corinne's first photographs of Kate. They had that end-of-summer feel and seemed very fresh and almost naive, but in a good way. To me, they were her best photographs." The paradox is, although Day’s work is so highly controversial and unaccepted by a large population, it is parallel to that very successful in delivering a paradigm. Day’s ‘Dirty Realism’, also comparable to Richard Billingham’s or Boris Mikhailov’s work, is highly successful in presenting us stories that can only be written by life itself. By “discarding any aesthetic or journalistic safety net” (BJP, No. 7299, p.25) she is aware of the risk that Diary bears, and more importantly produces images that leave little space for interpretation apart from pure reality. That this reality is dirty, or intense as others call it, is less a matter of a photographic style – it is a way of life the image-maker chose to live long before even thinking of recording it. Without praise, it is this particular lifestyle that can be accredited for Day’s, and of course also Goldin’s body of work. The photographic Diary of Corinne Day: An extensive study on her visual practice with reference to Laura Marks and Nan Goldin.

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. Corinne Day, a self taught photographer, first became known for the images she published in 1990 in The Face of her friend, Kate Moss. The series launched what came to be known as 'grunge' style. Day photographed her again in 1993 for British Vogue and it was these shots - Moss in skimpy underwear and American tan tights, at home in her dingy, west London flat - which further changed the face of fashion photography, and unleashed an international furore. Kruse Verlag published ‘Diary’ in 2000. This body of work was exhibited at The Photographers' Gallery in London in the same year. Growing up as the youngest of four children, Nan Goldin (born 1953 in Maryland) unexpectedly became closest to the eldest of her siblings. When she was eleven years old her 18-year-old sister Barbara committed suicide. Without a doubt, this incident had a life long effect on her, even though Nan knew it was going to happen since her sister told her years before. An upcoming installation in her new hometown of Paris is supposed to be about her sister’s death and mental illness. The obsessive need to record memories and her particular interest in women’s sexuality are also symptoms instigated by her sister’s death. Day retreated from fashion work in the wake of the heroin chic debate, instead choosing to tour America with the band Pusherman and concentrate on her documentary photography. She also undertook work photographing musicians, including the image of Moby, used on his 1999 album Play.

Corinne Day

Retreating from fashion work in the wake of the ‘heroin chic’ debate, Day spent much of her personal time over the next seven years taking photographs for her first book, ‘Diary’, a personal visual record of her life and friends, including Tara St Hill and the band, Pusherman with whom she toured America. The book is by turns both bleak and frank, but it is also a tender, poetic and honest chronicle of young lives. 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. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, in late August 2010, Belinda White said, "Corinne opened the door for a whole generation of photographers, designers, models and stylists who suddenly saw that the fashion industry didn't have to be this exclusive club for the privileged and perfect." [12] DD: Corinne is known for her lasting relationships with the people she photographed. How did she work with her subjects to achieve this sense of personal involvement?