Corinne Day: Diary

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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. After her initial illness, Corinne Day made an uneasy truce with fashion photography. She abandoned her raw, edgy style for something more traditional in the fashion shoots she did for, among others, Vogue. Her older photographs were exhibited in the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate Modern and even the Saatchi Gallery. Diary also records the dramatic events of the fateful night in 1996 when Day collapsed in her New York apartment and was rushed to Bellevue hospital. There, she underwent an emergency operation for a brain tumour. She insisted that her boyfriend, Mark Szaszy, photograph her, even in the moments leading up to her surgery. She looks dazed, helpless, disoriented. "To me, photography is about showing us things we don't normally see," she said later, "Getting as close as you can to real life." The book's final picture is of a beach strewn with beer cans: a glimmer of hope, and yet a tarnished one.

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.' 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 sadly passed away in August 2010. It is now thought that her disciplined following of alternative treatments and good nutrition after her surgery, with the aid of her husband Mark Szaszy, helped to extend her life. 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. 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.

Corinne and Marevna

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? During an extended trip to Hong Kong and Thailand, Szaszy taught Day how to use a camera and in 1987 they moved to Milan. It was in Milan that Day's career as a fashion photographer started. Having produced photographs of Szaszy and her friends for their modelling portfolios, Day began approaching magazines for work. [2] First steps in fashion photography [ edit ] 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.

The photographic Diary of Corinne Day: An extensive study on her visual practice with reference to Laura Marks and Nan Goldin.Both of us being on the dole we shared the expense of buying clothes. I always bought clothes that I would wear myself. Music was our inspiration for the “Third Summer of Love” photographs that I took in 1990 for the FACE. Kate and I liked Nirvana, Stone Roses and Happy Mondays. These photographs were about Kate. I wanted to capture her presence, not so much mine. And I like the way that she was skinny. I was teased at school for being thin and clothes would never fit me when I was a model. In the 1980's you had to wear loads of make-up. I didn't like the fake poses and phony faces. I thought fashion photography came across all about the photographer instead of the person they photographed. Fashion magazines had been selling sex and glamour for far too long. I wanted to instill some reality into a world of fantasy.

Corinne Day built her reputation on her impeccable visual management, in addition to never accepting to retouch the image of her models with technology since presenting them with dark circles, scars or anything else was important because they were like that in real life. 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. Diary also records the dramatic events of the fateful night in 1996 when Corinne collapsed in her New York apartment and was rushed to Bellevue hospital. There, she underwent an emergency operation for a brain tumour. She insisted that Mark photographed her, even in the moments leading up to her surgery. She looks dazed, helpless, disoriented. “To me, photography is about showing us things we don’t normally see,” she said later, “Getting as close as you can to real life.” The book’s final picture is of a beach strewn with beer cans: a glimmer of hope, and yet a tarnished one. 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?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. Dazed Digital: When was the first time you worked with Corinne? What was your first impression of her photography? 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. Corinne Day (19 February 1962 – 27 August 2010) was a British fashion photographer, documentary photographer, [1] and fashion model. 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.'