I can remember the smell of the dusty, stale library air and the feel of the smooth pages between my fingers. The secretive feeling as I looked at something I deemed elicit. I viewed each image with awe, as my cheeks reddened. 

I was baffled. Were these images of people's lives, or were they staged? They exuded visions of an alternative — of drugs and raves, sex, abandon, of new life, and death, and all the things that happen in between. 

I was eighteen, newly living in London, and lonely and miserable. At the time, I believed the images in Corinne Day's Diary were snaps, candidly captured in the moment, as she documented her life and those of her close friends. Steeped in memories, I knew the time they captured had passed. I longed to have been part of it. Alas, it had slipped through my fingers. 

In 2019 I wrote an oral history of Corinne Day for System; it went unpublished due to image licensing issues. For the piece Phil Bicker, art director, told me, "Those images being captured by Corinne were not captured in the moment. They were captured from moments that happened, which she observed, then she would recreate them. She asked people to go and sit on the toilet again; she asked people to go do this, that, and the other. The fact that those images are constructed makes Corinne far more of a genius than people will ever give her credit for. She was in denial about that; she thought it was better to tell people she was capturing moments as they happened." 

The images had fooled me, but my interest didn't wane. Bicker is right; the power in the photographs is the confusion they spark. Through them, you draw into question the very function of a fashion image, the clothes in these images are not for sale, but they were selected. The images instead sell a lifestyle; they glamourize a particular way of life for better or worse. 

Tara St Hill explained that "Half of Diary is a fashion shoot, that's what people don't realize. If I went through the book, I could point out what's styled and set up. Even the pictures taken in my front room in Thornton Avenue are art-directed; I changed cups, and I added things. One time we shot Emma, and we wanted her to have red lips, so I said: 'Let's get her to drink a bottle of wine, so she gets the red stain you get when you've been drinking wine all night.' I put cigarette ash on the models' feet so it looked how it might when you walk around the flat barefoot, and your feet get dirty." For the image below St Hill asked the model Georgina which color tampax string she would like to "wear" for the image. 

Some fashion photography sells clothes, but others sell ideas. So how will fashion photography respond to the climate crisis? How will it question current consumption? How will it genuinely present people from different cultural backgrounds and races accurately and celebratorily? How will it represent people who are of different sizes and shapes and people who are not able-bodied? 

These were the questions I put to seven students from Falmouth University's BA Fashion Photography program last fall. I asked them to create a body of work that employed the tropes of fashion photography but instead held people and the planet, instead of profit, at the core.

The work they created traced the interconnectedness of these issues. In Talitha Harris' series, she invited her friends to give her clothes they no longer wanted. She used these to style her images. But at the same time, she had to live amongst the detritus, as it piled up in her bedroom, hindering her movement and increasingly encroaching on her space. 

Kezia Jenvey and Phitcha Emwan both looked to their own very different cultural heritage for inspiration. In Phitcha Emwan's work, she mourns the loss of her Thai homeland culture in the wake of moving to England as a child. Bringing conversations of cultural heritage preservation and racial melancholia to the space of sustainability, her self portrait, featured here, is arresting — it is deliberately ambiguous as she continues to seek harmony amongst these two parts of herself. 

Kezia Jenvey took her younger brothers into both the domestic and natural landscape to explore ideas of home, capturing them tussling and wrestling as they used their bodies to create temporary architecture. Nostalgia is present in the images, as she wonders where the future will lead.

In the series by Eva Jiggins, she explored the way women are objectified in advertising images. Aping the glossy, posed shots we see on billboards, she draws us in. When she has our attention, she subverts the messaging, using the photographs to sell information about the water wasted when making jeans. 

Fran Rowse made a body of work about women and water, but here she explored the relationship women's bodies have to redemption and renewal. Questioning stereotypical depictions of women, her model appeared like a specter, her face obscured; in another, the damp glossy skin is a stark contrast.  

The natural world was a space to explore for Tee Langdown and Tom Priestley. In Tom Priestley's work, he journeyed to the Peak District National Park in central England with his father. After years of estrangement, nature was the balm that bonded them together again. In Tee Langdown's series, she celebrated decay; she documents the decomposition of fruit in all its beauty in her still life.   

Finally, in Imogen Wilkinson's series, she used found objects to highlight waste. Objectifying the white male body, she uses an anonymous, faceless model as scaffolding to present her finds. She staged her images as crime scenes, noting in the accompanying captions the date the objects had been found.   

These images successfully explore a space that uses the potency and marketing know-how that usually sells us things we don't want or need to explore emotions intimate and tender, or behaviors systemic and overarching. 

In Michael Moss' 2013 rigorous investigation into the science of addictive junk food for The New York Times, he profiles Jeffrey Dunn, who was previously Coca Cola's president and chief operating officer of North and South America. Dunn was tasked with growing the number of people who drank Coca Cola; the holy grail was to capture the people he and his team called "heavy users." They didn't want to outsell other soda brands; they hoped to outsell all other beverages — including milk and water. 

On a trip to Brazil, where the company was about to roll out an aggressive campaign, Dunn had an epiphany. The people who lived in the favelas in Brazil needed many things, but they didn't need Coke. As a result, he left the company. 

The article catches up with him in 2010 when he is presenting a new marketing idea to a private equity firm. Moss writes, "He talked about giving the product a personality that was bold and irreverent, conveying the idea that this was the ultimate snack food. He went into detail on how he would target a special segment of the 146 million Americans who are regular snackers — mothers, children, young professionals — people, he said, who "keep their snacking ritual fresh by trying a new food product when it catches their attention." He explained how he would deploy strategic storytelling in the ad campaign for this snack, using a key phrase that had been developed with much calculation: "Eat' Em Like Junk Food." 

The snack that Dunn was proposing to sell was carrots. No additives, no dipping sauce, just washed baby carrots in a bag in the snack aisle. If you can dress up and sell raw cut carrots, why can't you sell new systems for the future?

Thank you for reading. See you in two weeks.

Shonagh