12.09.2011 Corinne Day

The London Gallery will this month pay tribute to revolutionary photographer Corinne Day to mark the one year anniversary of her death on 27th August. Her use of candid style techniques to capture provocative and often biographical images came to define the 90's aesthetic that rejected the high-gloss images of mainstream magazines, which later became known as the fashion grunge scene.
In an interview by Dazed Digital, a colleague of Day, Alice Correia discussed the relevance of Corinne Day's photography in today’s society.
DD: How do you think the images speak to today’s society?
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.

Even 20-odd years later, Corinne’s photographs of Kate Moss, George Clements and Rosemary Ferguson still have a freshness; Corinne rejected the ‘Amazonian’ shoulder-padded look of the 1980s because it was fake; given the rise of fake tan, Botox and plastic surgery in today’s media culture, there is something to be celebrated in images of natural look teenagers, be they skipping down an empty highway, rolling a spliff, or slouching around at home.

I wanted to blog about this interview because, although I am not a huge fan of Corinne Day’s documentary work (though I like some of her more commercial fashion projects) I fell that with any controversial work, both sides of an argument must be heard before you can make up your mind about something. When researching the debate around the nature of Day’s work and its heroin chic content the majority of the views are negative, focusing on the adverse effects the scenes may depict, whereas when I came across Alice Correia’s comment on Corinne rejecting the falseness of the 1980’s culture and implying that we should celebrate images which show natural looking teenagers, being teenagers I had to conclude that in this case the photographs have both good and evils to them and in today’s culture which is driven by consumers and fake self-identity they can be viewed as equally helpful as they are damaging and therefore, like most things worth thinking about in life cannot have a definite answer and we should instead enjoy the aesthetic feel to Corinne Days work and remember her as a key photographer of the 90’s and her contribution to changing the attitudes of the fashion world.