On August 27th 2010 the fashion world lost one of it’s greatest photographers of a generation. Corinne Day, known as the woman who launched Kate Moss’s career, sadly died aged 48 from a brain tumour after a long struggle with cancer.

A self taught photographer and previous model, she became one of the most influential photographers of our time. Her pictures were original, provocative and often controversial. Shying away from the high glamour trend of the 80s, she took a more documentary approach to her photos.

In 1990 she teamed up with a young, fresh faced Kate Moss and headed down to Camber Sands, Kent, for a series of candid and intimate portraits for The Face magazine’s ‘3rd Summer of Love’  editorial. I will never forget how I felt when I first saw those iconic black & white images. Unpolished, raw, natural beauty unlike anything I’d seen in fashion before, she captured a moment in fashion history and inspired a whole generation of people, me included. Credited for pioneering the Grunge movement, the images spawned a new era of fashion and fashion photography.

Three years later she was causing a storm once more when Vogue magazine published the somewhat seedy pictures of Kate Moss in a grubby bedsit wearing mismatched underwear and looking pale and forlorn. Gritty, hard edged and real, the shoot caused international outrage and the radical new wave of photography, labelled  ‘dirty-realism’, paved the way for the ‘Heroin chic’ trend that was to follow.

A revolutionary in fashion image making, Corinne Day changed the way we viewed fashion photography.