CORRINE DAY

Corrine Day, born in 1965, is a British photographer whose influence on the style and perception of photography in the early 1990s has been immense. As a self taught photographer, Day brought more hard edged documentary look to fashion image making, in which she often included biographical images. Day is known for forming long and close relationships with many of her sitters (most famously Kate Moss), which has resulted in candid and intimate portraits. The most notable of these being the photographs of Moss in the 3rd Summer of Love editorial for the FACE magazine in 1990. Day's approach within the lifestyle and fashion magazines during the 1990s came to be known as grunge and grey into an international style.

Disdaining the use of fictions such as airbrushing, Corrine Day introduced the quality of documentary into her work, aiming to take fashion out of the drawing room or boudoir and locating it firmly on the street.

In 1993, she shot Moss in the model's flat for the March cover of Vogue and after, this was credited with launching the era of the waif and heroin chic look. A times critics blamed her for promoting anorexia and even pedophilia after featuring topless shots of Moss in her fashion stories. Corrine herself was always unapologetic about her raw, hard edged take on the world: 'Photography is getting as close as you can to real life, showing us things we don't normally see. These are peoples most intimate moments, and sometimes intimacy is sad.'

In the context of a fashion magazine the images appear to have a documentary feel about them and when published caused a certain frisson of discomfort.

For the following seven years Days spent most of her personal time taking photographs for her first book, Diary, an intensely personal visual record of her life and friends. It is by turns both bleak and disappearing, but it is also a tender, poetic and honest chronicle of young lives.

Corrine Day continues to take photographs for fashion magazines. She is regularly commissioned by British, Italian and Japanese Vogue. Days' work has been exhibited at the Notional Portrait Gallery, Tate Modern, and included ion the Andy Warhol exhibition at the Whitney Museum in NY.