Corinne DayReviewPhotographer who found unadorned beauty – and launched Kate Moss on the fashion world

Corinne Day, who died last August, will be remembered for transforming fashion with her pictures of the young Kate Moss for the Face.

While her famous shot of 16-year-old Moss wrinkling her nose in a feathery headdress was actually the second time the model had been on the cover of the style mag (the first time was two months earlier – improbably, an Italia 90 special), Day's photographs seemed to sum up a new era. The early 90s was a time of hedonism, hope, and change: repressive regimes around Europe were toppled, the Berlin wall came down, and rave culture seemed to offer young clubbers a glimpse of a utopian society.

The photographs in this small exhibition, not featuring that cover shot but mainly culled from two 1991 Face fashion stories, recapture that feeling of optimism: of a coming generation deciding to do things their way. Instead of the imperious busty glamazon you'd find in an 80s fashion shoot, you have Moss.

With lank hair, no make-up and wearing what look at this 20-year distance to be charity shop finds (scuffed boots, tatty jumpers), she's beautiful but fresh and real: recognisably a girl from Croydon. In a series of pictures taken in Borneo, she seems barely older than the local kids. One shot sees her leading a grinning young boy whose face is surrounded by the petals of a giant paper flower, like Barry Mooncult, dancer with early 90s band Flowered Up . In another, she's posed in a tropical location, but wearing a floppy hat and clutching a bottle of beer, more Club 18-30 than Condé Nast Travel.

Day's pictures junk the materialistic trappings of the 80s. Instead of glossy aspiration, she celebrates the ordinary – cracks in the wall, Rizlas on the floor, the grotty carpets immediately recognisable to anyone who's ever lived in rented accommodation. Out go big hair and shoulder pads: in come drainpipe jeans and secondhand shirts (not yet described as "vintage"). A picture of a young man lying topless by a lake as the sun goes down foregrounds the litter, gravel and muddy patches that earlier fashion photographers would have been at pains to remove.

Moss has been so omnipresent over the years that looking at old pictures of her is inevitably a nostalgic experience. A series of 2007 close-ups allows us to compare then and now, although she seems to have escaped with only a few wrinkles in these passport-photo-like shots. (A Juergen Teller shoot in Self Service magazine last year was far more brutal.) The real novelty is seeing close-ups of her talking, since she utters so few words in public.

While Day's aesthetic – of finding beauty in the mundane – soon became commodified by brands such as Calvin Klein, these pictures still have a tangible idealism which is bittersweet in hindsight. Their mood is summed up in the slogan of a brooch Moss is wearing in a couple of pictures. It reads "Heaven is real".

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJmiqa6vsMOeqqKfnmR%2FcX2QaKqeqF9lf3Cvzqugp6aVYrGixYyfmJydXaW1sMDOoKmaqJiuerOx1aKcsA%3D%3D