Day shot photos of bald truth

Corinne Day's frank, unadorned photos of a teenage Kate Moss in the early 1990s helped inaugurate a new era of gritty realism in fashion photography that came to be called "grunge."

Day died Friday at her home in Denham, a village in Buckinghamshire, England.

The cause was a cancerous brain tumor, said her agent, Susan Babchick. According to her website, Day was 45, but public records indicate she was 48.

Day's passion to record the most profound human experiences with a camera was never more evident than the day in 1996 when the tumor was discovered after she had collapsed in New York. She promptly asked her husband to shoot pictures of her, and they continued the project through her treatment and decline.

"Photography is getting as close as you can to real life," she said, "showing us things we don't normally see. These are people's most intimate moments, and sometimes intimacy is sad."

Day built her reputation on unrelenting visual honesty. She refused to airbrush the bags from under models' eyes. She disliked pretty locations or studios, preferring to shoot people in their own environments.

She took a startling detour from the glossy world of supermodels - "subversion," in Day's own phrase.

In 1990, Day's fashion photos of Moss in the British magazine The Face were among the first ever published. One showed Moss topless; another suggested she was naked. She wore a mix of designer and secondhand clothes and no makeup over her freckles. The photos seemed to usher in a new age of anti-fashion style. Artlessness became art.

In 1993, Day's shoot for British Vogue featured a pale, skinny Moss in mismatched underwear. Some claimed her waifish figure suggested an eating disorder.