My camera, a full English breakfast, Irene keeping me company and a pair of spandex. Life is good!
This is my Best Friend in is younger wilder years. I love looking through prints of rolls I shot on film before digital was an option.
But she turned her back on the airbrushed glossiness of magazines, complaining "they're stale, just about sex and glamour, when there are other elements of beauty." Despite shooting covers for Vogue and influencing catwalk couture, Day grew disenchanted by commercial success. She said she "aspired to reportage" and started producing more intimate, sometimes brutal, portraits of her friends and the un-orchestrated minutiae of their everyday lives.
Such is Day's compulsion to catch every human experience on camera, that when she herself was diagnosed with a brain tumour, she made sure her boyfriend recorded her entire hospital experience. He only did it, he said, "to take her mind off what was happening".
She says, "Photography is getting as close as you can to real life, showing us things we don't normally see. These are people's most intimate moments, and sometimes intimacy is sad."
This is a sad day.
