Published as a posthumous tribute to the cult American actress and writer Cookie Mueller, this catalog features a sequence of 15 photographs taken by Nan Goldin over their thirteen-year friendship. Goldin, a pioneer of “private photography,” documents Mueller’s life from the vibrant party days of the New York underground to her eventual decline and death from AIDS-related complications in 1989. The images—many of which also appear in Goldin’s masterpiece “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”—capture Mueller’s legendary charisma, her role in John Waters’ films, and the intimate, often tragic domestic spaces she inhabited. It serves as a raw and tender visual eulogy for a central figure of the downtown scene.
