This exhibition focuses on some of Corinne Day’s (1965-2010) best known work for The Face magazine from the early 1990s and it neatly captures Day’s vision and method. As the images brim with youthful energy, inevitably the impression the show leaves is dominated by the passing of time, with pictures by a photographer who died too young, working for a magazine that no longer exists.
The Face magazine, published from 1980 to 2004, was hugely influential with its boundary-pushing graphic design and fresh, provocative photography by David LaChapelle, Juergen Teller and David Sims among others. Corinne Day’s first story for The Face, a photo shoot with the joyously grinning teenage Kate Moss, was published in July 1990. This exhibition is mostly made up of two editorials from the following year, Heaven is Real and Borneo, alongside photographs from a 1993 shoot, England’s Dreaming, the band Red Hot Chili Peppers photographed in Los Angeles and a portrait commission for the National Portrait Gallery from 2007.
The images seen here are almost unrecognisable as fashion shoots, such is their lack of aspirational luxury. The images are so spontaneous they almost seem like private snapshots, stumbled upon by the photographer. This intimate quality can also be seen in the National Portrait Gallery series of headshots of Kate Moss, variously mid-conversation or pausing for thought. The contrast between the teenage model and the mature woman further underlines the impression of the exhibition as an elegy to Day.
Day is credited as making fashion imagemaking raw and direct, echoing the immediacy of documentary rather than commercial photography. While her work is often described as a reaction against the glossy fashion imagery of the 1980s, it can also be seen in the context of earlier street photography and its influence on fashion; after all, photographers such as David Bailey famously took their models out of the formal studio environment onto the streets decades before Day. Perhaps her biggest talent was in capturing the perfect image for the age, as the popular mood turned to grunge after the consumerist excesses of the 1980s.
Although Day’s work was very much of about the new, some of the visual elements in her work echo art from the past. England’s Dreaming (George Sunset) from 1993 has the formal qualities and subtle tonal colours of a 19th century landscape painting. Heaven is Real (Kate eyes open) could be read as a contemporary Madonna, showing the tranquil model with her eyes heavenward and crimped hair for a halo.
Day’s work could be interpreted as perfectly encapsulating a moment in popular culture with an aesthetic specific to the 1990s: the anti-fashion fashion, the grotty but cool settings, and models that are imperfect and approachable. Because Day was so much part of the scene she photographed, and so many of her images were about youth, it would have been fascinating to see how she would have captured mature lives and ageing. Sadly we will never find out.
Reviewed by Riikka Kuittinen
