It was never comfortable to look at the photographs taken by Corinne Day, who has died aged 48 from a brain tumour. Her documentary work was plain, and plaintive. Her fashion shots, even her recent, formally glamorous sequences for Vogue, have a sense that the girls, the gowns, the gorgeous locations are transient, and likely fake anyway. And the promise that Day had perceived in a Polaroid image of a 14-year-old aspirant model – Kate Moss – was her potential for wistfulness. "In photos," Day said, "we're usually laughing and happy and having a good time. We don't normally see the other side, when we're not having such a good time." It was always visible through Day's lens.
Day told interviewers that her "nan" had brought her up – her portrait of her grandmother shows tough tenderness – in Ickenham, west London. She claimed her mother had run a brothel, hence, perhaps, Day's unimpressed attitude towards sex, while her tearaway father had become respectable and successfully pursued serious money, but was distant from her emotionally.
Day's first job after her failed schooldays was as a courier, catching planes around the world as casually as buses, surviving on snacks squirrelled away from inflight meals. She became a model because a photographer on a flight suggested it, but knew she was not a cover girl diva: melancholy already muted her face. Still, it was a better living – appearing in adverts in the US and Australia, and catalogues in Japan. There she met her lifetime partner Mark Szaszy, who taught her how to use his camera, which she did while modelling in Milan.
She shot what she knew: kids who wore couture on the catwalk and for the camera, but who dressed in old tat, dossed in cheap rooms and "couldn't afford to go out and do the things we would have liked to do". Fashion employed progressively younger models from the early 1960s, and by the late 80s 16-year-olds were commonplace: the sad contrast intensified between their reality and the affluent arrogance they were paid to project. Day knew her pictures were original, and Phil Bicker, the art director of The Face, recognised that her teen strays suited his magazine, and commissioned a fashion shoot. Day went round the London agencies looking for a model who reflected her images from Milan, and found her in a snap of a scraggy-haired Croydon schoolgirl, Moss.
Their first great success, the Face cover sequence The 3rd Summer of Love, was published in July 1990, with Moss, barely 16, in bits of quality ready-to-wear and Portobello market finds – and, in the two most famed images, nothing but headgear, despite the chill of Camber Sands, in East Sussex, where the shoot took place. Moss's half-combative, half-pathetic attitudes are suffused with laughter. Moss's agency, though, disliked Day's refusal to retouch the pictures. As a model, she explained, she had hated being made "into someone I wasn't. I wanted to go in the opposite direction." (She was protective enough of Moss to share a flat with her for three years.)
With the stylist Melanie Ward, Day took the aesthetic further, wrapping shaggy, sometimes druggy, youngsters dragged off the street in mismatched vintage clothes: this became the "waif look", the visual equivalent of Seattle's grunge music. Day shot Moss almost unadorned for a Vogue cover in 1993, did collections for the magazine and supermodel sittings – at first this was an ambition achieved, but she later said: "They're stale, just about sex and glamour, when there are other elements of beauty." However, she felt no thrill, not even a rebel's excitement at the outraged response to her heroin chic Underexposed Vogue sequence, with Moss in saggy tights, looking as if she were in rehab. By then, many of Day's London friends really were in rehab, or should have been. In 1991, she had taken up with a group based around a heavy rock band, Pusherman. They were into cannabis, ketamine and heroin (although Day did not always join them; drugs clouded the camera vision she valued – she was "a photography junkie" ); they were badly off in that recessionary era.
For almost a decade, Day, influenc- ed by the documentary art of Nan Goldin, photographed their messy lives, particularly that of Tara St Hill, an impoverished, sick, single mother, shown in sex and pregnancy, in tears and tinsel, and at parties, or wasted in her Stoke Newington squat: "What I found interesting was to capture people's most intimate moments. And sometimes intimacy is sad."
Day was included in the imagery – "the camera becomes a part of your life". When she collapsed in New York in 1996, she told Szaszy, who had called the medics, not to forget her camera as he joined her in the ambulance to Bellevue hospital. His hands shook as he took the shots she requested – of her in a bed just after being told she had a brain tumour, in a lift on the way to the operating theatre for its removal – yet she felt having those moments pictured gave her control. A hundred of these images were collected in Diary, published in 2001 and much admired for its hard, but never cruel, candour.
She and Szaszy left drugs behind, and she made a pact with fashion and its finance, mellowing her visuals, even working with Moss again for Vogue. Later she accepted a National Portrait Gallery commission for a sequence of nine close-ups of Moss. Just as on Camber Sands, they chatted, so that Day could capture Moss's animation.
Day's photographs, fashion and not, were exhibited at the Victoria & Albert, Science and Design museums, Tate Modern, the Saatchi Gallery, and the Photographers' Gallery, and Szaszy spent a devoted decade making a documentary of her at work, which was shown on BBC Four in 2004.
Her tumour returned two years ago. To pay for specialised chemotherapy in a clinic in Arizona, her friends raised more than £100,000 through a Save the Day campaign, by selling limited-edition photographic prints, including a set featuring Moss, some signed by the model. Day completed the treatment last year, but it did not arrest the disease.
She is survived by Szaszy.