03.09.10
Corinne Day, British fashion photographer, dies
It is with great sadness that I sit down to write this obituary to mark the death of photographer Corinne Day on 27 August from cancer.
We were the same age and I first met her when we were both starting out in our careers. It was the very early nineties and Corinne had shot some black and white reportage images of rockers for The Face magazine. It was a small story and the images were not large, but there was a power and immediacy to them that was as I was later to define as very ‘Corinne’.
I was commissioning photography for Elle magazine and on the lookout for like-minded souls so I rang The Face to get her number. I called her, asked her to come in, and she duly did. A slight figure carrying a large, black, vinyl zip-up student portfolio, she had a piercing intensity. She was cool and confident despite the fact that she had little work other than the biker images. Alongside her, helping her with the portfolio was an equally delicate Kate Moss. Who could guess what lay ahead for them both?
I never worked with Corinne at Elle, her career went into a stratospheric trajectory thanks to some innocent, naïve beach images of her friend Kate: topless, gap toothed, happy, wearing an Indian headdress for The Face. She was a Face photographer, one of a team who took on the world that included David Sims, Glen Luchford, Juergen Teller, Mario Sorrenti, the art director Phil Bicker and the fashion editor Anna Cockburn.
Those were fun, innocent days, a time when photography, fashion, music and fun converged to create what was inaccurately described as ‘grunge’. But Corinne wasn’t content to just take the praise. She was on a mission to explore her vision and, with Kate as her muse, she took on the fashion world. This culminated in a fashion shoot for UK Vogue that saw her images of an carefree Kate lounge around the kind of flat that they and their friends lived in. It caused national uproar. Kate was too thin! This wasn’t fashion photography! Where was the glamour? But they were reflecting their own lives and having fun so, actually, they didn’t care. The greater the controversy, the more they were in demand. She had channelled the spirit of Nan Goldin and made it commercial by doing things her way.
I worked with Corinne only once and by the time I did her vision was formed. She had her look in place and people were asking to be photographed by her. They wanted to be part of her world, even if it was just for the length of one shoot.
We shot Patsy Kensit together. Patsy was just coming to the end of her relationship with Simple Minds singer Jim Kerr, just before she met Liam Gallagher. We started the shoot in a clean, white daylight studio in the east end of London. Patsy was fine with it but Corinne wasn’t. She wanted a space that she could work with and the studio wasn’t giving her anything. A decision was made to decamp to the old railway hotel on top of Paddington Station.
This was Corinne territory: run-down, dark, dirty, unsettling. The room she booked was filled with stained, mismatched furniture and peeling wallpaper. The colours were brown and orange. It was grim but Corinne was alive. She had bought with her some bracelets that she had made and she wanted Patsy to storm down the hotel’s desolate corridors kicking the walls. “It’s two in the morning,” she told Patsy, “He’s left you; show me how you feel.” That was Corinne, she got to the heart of the matter.
She was even willing to turn the camera on herself and record her own downs, those days that most of us would never have the courage to admit to, let alone record. If you want to understand what I mean, get a copy of her book Diary. The pictures say more than any words I could put down here.
To me Corinne will always be that slight figure I met with Kate in the days when we all had the desire and ambition with no idea of what lay ahead.
“It is all about freedom, really,” she once said, “And being proud of the holes in your jumper.”
Grant Scott
Editor, Photography Monthly
www.corinneday.co.uk
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