Corinne Day: Diary

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It is a similar image in Larry Clark’s Tulsa that puts a friend into the same context of ambiguity. In an almost pictorialist fashion Clark photographed a pregnant woman sitting on a chair in front of a window. The optimism is soon to be destroyed with a photograph of a three-foot coffin. With out a doubt it is the coffin for the newborn of Clark’s friend who was a notorious heroin shooter. In Diary though, the take on life and birth of life is different. The viewer identifies Tara as an inopportune individual who is forced to live a life at the edge of society. Nevertheless, she also seems to be a loving and caring mother in pictures where she bathes or feeds her baby. Towards the end of her life, Day continued to shoot for leading publications, finding her work once again gracing the covers of Vogue magazine. Unapologetically exposed, not only does Corinne Day have an impressive portfolio but one that defined a decade. Weather it is based on the love for nostalgia or a general consensus with loss and ultimately death, Day’s realism has invited the viewer to do much more than just to look. The very intimate photographs of her friends and herself are an homage to life, despite all its life derogating depictions. It is Day’s reality of living that enables the viewer to respond to her photographs almost as if they are windows into an unknown world. As much as some of us might be appalled, the invitation is honest and genuine. One has to ask himself if it is more appalling to know that someone photographs reality, than it is to know that this reality indeed exists. In effect, Day has broken a pattern that put up a mirror in three directions: her friends, her self and the viewer. 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. 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.

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 ] His life was short. He died at 48 years of age, but left his mark on what he was most passionate about: the world of photography. After her initial illness, Corinne 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, British, French and Italian Vogue, Arena and Vivienne Westwood. 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.'During the 2000s Day returned to fashion photography, working for British, French and Italian Vogue, Arena and Vivienne Westwood, amongst others. During this time she also photographed film actors Nicolas Cage, Sienna Miller and Scarlett Johansson. Alice Correia: The gallery’s exhibition programme goes in cycles; the last exhibition of Corinne’s work was in 2006. She was overdue a show, but had been too ill to work on a solo exhibition in the years before her death. Instead of making new work, the idea was to select works from the archive: to show works that had been out of the public eye for a while. In discussion with her husband it was agreed to schedule a show to open the new September season. Her smile changes the whole mood of a winter night photograph showing a skeleton like tree. The trees leaves are going to grow and overshadow the garbage it was caught up with. As much as spring leaves winter behind, the viewer hopes that Tara leaves the hospital and therefore also her self-destructive lifestyle behind. The following and also last photograph of a trashed beach shows that bliss does exist, but it would take time to heal the wounds of the past.

She gained fame and recognition for her work in the fashion industry, but Corinne Day longed to document the lives of the people she knew best, so in 2000 she published Diary, a book where she told visual stories, including a single mother's struggle to survive. Marevna was part of a group of artists living and working in the teaming quarter of La Ruche in Paris between 1912 - 1921 all of whom were some of the greatest artists of the 20th century - Picasso, Braque, Leger, Max Jacob, Modigliani, Chagall, Kremegne, the poets Ehrenburg and Cocteau, Charlie Chaplan and the writers and intellectuals of Montparnasse. 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. Alice Correia: Of course Corinne’s work will always draw a certain amount of attention because of who they depict, but beyond that, I think these images speak of a moment of teenage self-exploration; of a time when anything was possible because the whole world is at your fingertips. 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.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. At times, Diary is bleak and despairing, as it chronicles these young lives with uncompromising honesty. At others, it is joyful in its simple celebration of friendship. Any sense of voyeurism is tempered by the fact that Day clearly shares in the lives of her subjects. Whether visible or not, she is always, herself, emotionally present in her photographs. DD: The exhibition features Corinne’s early photographs of Kate Moss, who she worked with extensively – what do you think attracted Corinne to capture her so frequently? Day was inspired by music. "It brings atmospheres alive," she once said. "I really believe you have to have time off to be creative, which is why I don't have a darkroom. If I did have one, I'd spend my whole life revolving around photography, and then I wouldn't get any inspiration to take pictures."

Corinne Day (19 February 1962 – 27 August 2010) was a British fashion photographer, documentary photographer, [1] and fashion model. Along with a subtle change of photographic style, her tribe or family as one might want to call it, also transformed. A lot of the people she photographed in the 70’s and eighties died of AIDS - the virus was discovered only a few years after she got off Heroin in 1973. Nearly every drag queen Nan Goldin ever lived with died and many faces of The Ballad also vanished. Ironically her newest slideshow is called Heartbeat and it features a more positive take on life. Babies and children presented in this piece are symbols of renewal, whereas she rules out that there is any deeper meaning to it. In either case, Nan Goldin has gone full cycle by sharing stories of life, death, love, hate, illness and happiness – and she leaves it up to us to see and reason. With sixteen years of age, Day was only two years older than Goldin when she left school. Their family history is similarly convoluted whereas Day moved to her Grandmother - who is also included in Diary - when she was five. This might have to do with the fact that her father was, as she herself says, a “professional bank robber” (Cotton, p. 60). The questionable relationship with her parents is also depicted in her book with a picture of family members darkened down to an extent that the viewer can only identify Tara. 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. 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 3rd Summer of Love

Corinne and Marevna

On 7 August 2009, an article on models.com reported that Day had been diagnosed with a life-threatening brain tumor. [9] A fundraising campaign titled Save the Day was organised to raise funds so that Day could receive Insulin Potentiation Therapy Low Dose or IPTLD chemotherapy in Arizona, USA. [10] However, treatments were unsuccessful, and Day died on 27 August 2010. [11] Legacy and influence [ edit ] The photographic Diary of Corinne Day: An extensive study on her visual practice with reference to Laura Marks and Nan Goldin. 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. At that point, we thought it was really important to get someone else in who we both trusted – so I spoke to Donald [Christie], who was a dear friend of us all, and asked if he’d look at it. There came a point where we were so entrenched in it all that we needed a fresh set of eyes that wasn’t so emotionally involved, where there wasn’t so much at stake. And then we asked Neil [Moodie] to come in one day, to give his opinion. It was an amazing day because we were all in the office together, feeling like we were finally in a really good place to move forward. At that time, the book was going to be called England’s Dreaming but we were sat there, talking about the book when I said “It’s really special, Donald being involved, Neil, you and I, the circle has remained unbroken.” Corinne loved 13th Floor Elevators, and that song, and Mark just looked at me and the new name suddenly just happened. Because that’s what it was – all the people in the book were a part of her life, people whom she loved dearly, and everyone that’s been involved in it has been someone who she cared about a lot. It just was perfect. I burst into tears. I knew she’d love it. I know she’d really love it all.” Following her illness, Day returned to fashion photography and was regularly commissioned by British, Italian and Japanese Vogue amongst many others. Her work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate Modern, Saatchi Gallery, The Science Museum, The Design Museum, The Photographers' Gallery, Gimpel Fils Gallery and was also included in The Andy Warhol exhibition at the Whitney Museum, New York.

But the next time Corinne Day impinged on the public consciousness, that freshness had been replaced by a darker, harsher vision. In 1993, she photographed Kate Moss for a fashion shoot for British Vogue, Under-exposure. In it, the model looked strung out and sad, dressed down in baggy tights and stringy underwear that exacerbated her skinniness. Again, the photographs were a reaction to the glitzy unrealness of the fashion photography that Vogue usually featured, but here the extremity of Corinne Day’s vision provoked outrage and hysterical headlines about the glamorization of anorexia and hard drug use. 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. Corinne Day Diary was the culmination of ten years work and is an intensely personal and frank photographic account of her life and friendships during the last decade of the century in London. The series draws comparison with artists such as Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, who also live what they photograph. Like them, Day is curious about people who pursue experiences beyond the norm. She is extremely, at times even unbearably, close to her friends she photographs and yet she is so trusted that her presence is never regarded as intrusive, even at the most intimate moments. At times, Diary is bleak and despairing, as it chronicles these young lives with uncompromising honesty. At others, it is joyful in its simple celebration of friendship. Any sense of voyeurism is tempered by the fact that Day clearly shares in the lives of her subjects. Whether visible or not, she is always herself, emotionally present in her photographs. In Japan he crossed paths with filmmaker Mark Szaszy, who taught him to use the camera. Shortly after the couple married, Corinne Day began taking pictures of the empty and drab private lives of her fellow models, who seemed so sophisticated in public.Corinne Day, who died 27 August 2010 , will be remembered for transforming fashion with her pictures of the young Kate Moss for the Face. 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. The increase of multicultural debates, the availability of governmental funding and the disintegration of minorities meant that the movement of intercultural cinema was its strongest from 1985 to 1995. The general popularity of what then became a genre also had the consequence that a lot of films fell into he grey area of commercial and non-commercial. Artists from a visual minority were sometimes supported because of a multicultural policy in the public fund. However, since governmental subsidies for art declines, it becomes more difficult especially for artists of colour to get supported. 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.'