Corinne Day: Diary

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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. 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.' Alice Correia: Corinne grew up in a north-west London suburb at the end of the Metropolitan Line. She was acutely aware that the highly stylised images in the glossies did not reflect everyday teenage life- going to school, getting a part-time job etc- so she wanted to create images that would be familiar to people looking at them. 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 has never stopped making photographs. Diary - her first solo exhibition in London - is 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.

In doing so the individual searches for a language to express their cultural memory that inevitably leads to absence. By digging out old photographs and film footage (artefacts of culture that are usually held on to) the artist will soon realise that cultural memory is in the gaps of such imagery. The suspicion that conventional imagery cannot hold whatever the individual artist interprets as cultural memory led them to what Marks calls “new forms of expression” (Marks, p. 21). By reading Nan Goldin’s and Corinne Day’s biographies one realises very soon that their lives have been similarly accompanied by poverty, drugs and friendships that are comparable to family - probably because of these circumstances. The main difference is that Goldin’s photographs are of sexual identity whereas Day’s work is more likely about the identity of a whole class. Nevertheless, both Goldin and Day lived their lives in this class that is marginalized and usually behind closed doors. 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. 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. 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.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. 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. 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. 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. Taking its title from the Feburary 1991 fashion editorial, Heaven is Real will be published by Mörel Books to coincide with the exhibition, featuring unpublished photographs by Day taken in the late 80s and early 90s. An apt summarisation of how Day found beauty all around her, the photographs which were shot in-between fashion shoots and whilst filming a documentary following a group of homeless teenagers in Berlin reflect how Day’s observational style of photography seamlessly blended her work life with her personal life, never switching off.

Dazed Digital: When was the first time you worked with Corinne? What was your first impression of her photography? 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."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 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. Corinne Day, 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.

Living in Milan together, Day began photographing new models for their portfolios. Her ability to put the new faces at ease and communicate their personality made her a favourite with modelling agencies. 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.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. One of the most affecting, and harrowing sequences within the exhibition records Day's hospitalisation following the diagnosis of a brain tumour in 1996. Even at moments of maximum anxiety and pain, she makes sure that the camera is there to record the intensity of her experience. 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. 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 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.Corinne 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. 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.' 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.'