Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of Cookie Mueller's death. Even if you don't know anything about her, you've probably seen her severe, winged-out eyeliner or watched her in a John Waters movie—she was in four of them, including Pink Flamingos. She was also a writer (for Details, the East Village Eye, and BOMB) and a good friend of the photographer Nan Goldin. Goldin documented Mueller's life and death (Mueller died from complications related to AIDS in 1989) not with the distance of a photographer choosing a "person living with AIDS" as a tragic subject, but as an artist whose subjects happened to be her closest friends. You can go see one of Goldin's portraits of Mueller at the Portland Art Museum as part of Blue Sky: The Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts at 40, which I wrote about last week.

The portrait of Cookie Mueller on view now is part of a large body of work Goldin called "the Cookie portfolio" and describes here:

It was only in ’89, after Cookie died and I put together the Cookie portfolio—15 pictures taken over 13 years, with a text about our relationship—that I realized photographing couldn’t keep people alive. Even though I never consciously set out to create pictures that would help humanize AIDS, I realized they could affect others.

You should go see it.