"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.Īfter her initial illness, Corinne Day made an uneasy truce with fashion photography. She insisted that her boyfriend, Mark Szaszy, photograph her, even in the moments leading up to her surgery. There, she underwent an emergency operation for a brain tumour. Perhaps she was trying too hard to define herself against the reductive term, fashion photographer.ĭiary 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. It is, in many ways, a wilfully grim and unrelenting book, unredeemed by the kind of beautiful colour tones and glimpses of redemption that the great confessional photographer, Nan Goldin, one of Day's influences, brings to her work. 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.ĭiary, the resulting book, which was published in 2001, captures Day and her friends partying recklessly, getting high and coming down. The terms "heroin chic" and "grunge fashion" were born and bandied about in the tabloids. Again, the photographs were a reaction to the glitzy unrealness of the fashion photography that Vogue usually featured, but here the extremity of Day's vision provoked outrage and hysterical headlines about the glamorisation of anorexia and hard drug use. In it, the model looked strung out and sad, dressed down in baggy tights and stringy underwear that exacerbated her skinniness. In 1993, she photographed Kate Moss for a fashion shoot for British Vogue. I wanted to go in the opposite direction."īut the next time Corinne Day impinged on the public consciousness, that freshness had been replaced by a darker, harsher vision.
The photographer always made me into someone I wasn't. She later said, "It was something I just felt so deep inside, being a model and hating the way I was made up.
Day had brought her own experience of being a model into the shoot. Revealingly, neither Kate Moss or her model agency were pleased with the photographs, finding them too raw and unadorned. They had that end-of-summer feel and seemed very fresh and almost naive, but in a good way. "I loved Corinne's first photographs of Kate. Juergen Teller, one of Corinne Day's peers, and now the most globally successful photographer of all the young iconoclasts of that time, concurs. Kate hadn't been modelling for very long but, even in her awkwardness, she had that thing about her that Twiggy had in the 60s, a freshness that matched the times." In fact, as I recall, I sent them down there two or three times until they got it right. "It looked natural and simple but it was carefully constructed to look like that. Bicker is quick to point out that, although the fashion shoot seemed casual and unstyled, it was, in reality, the opposite. Inside, Moss cavorted on Camber Sands in hippy-style clothes, sometimes topless, like a girl who could not quite believe her luck. The summer – and the decade, and the style-obsessed world in which we now live – had found its face. The cover line announces "The 3rd Summer of Love" and promises features on the Stone Roses, Daisy Age fashion and psychedelia. On it, the young Moss, who appears to be wearing no make-up, grins like an excited and slightly gauche teenager from beneath a headdress made of fabric and feathers. The cover of the July 1990 issue of the Face gained iconic status in the fashion world and beyond. I sent Corinne and stylist, Melanie Ward, down to Camber Sands to do a shoot with her."
"It was an exciting time because we were making up the rules as we went along," says Bicker, now art director of the Magnum photographic agency in New York, "I saw the same thing in Kate as Corinne saw, that she represented something very real: the opposite, in fact, of all the unreal high glamour of fashion. Day was perhaps the most temperamental, a feisty, self-taught, model-turned-photographer with attitude to burn. He had gathered a bunch of young and ambitious photographers, including Glen Luchford, David Sims and Nigel Shafran, all of whom became successful in the fashion and art world. Back then, Bicker was busy reinventing British fashion photography as a gritty, altogether less glamorous form. She brought a photograph of the 14-year-old Kate Moss to Phil Bicker, the visionary art director of the Face magazine, then the single most influential style magazine in Europe. In many ways, then, Day was shadowed by the moment of her greatest good fortune: her spotting of a Polaroid of a gangly Croydon teenager among the files of a London model agency in the spring of 1990.
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