#bob berg

📷 Bob Berg/Getty Images

American photographer Peter Hujar poses for a May 1986 portrait in Bayonne, New Jersey.  Photo by Bob Berg.

📷 Bob Berg/Getty Images via

Fiona Apple photographed by Bob Berg, 1995

2Pac during the 1994 Source Awards at the Paramount Theatre in New York, © Bob Berg

Photographed by Bob Berg.

Radiohead photographed by Bob Berg, November 1994

Born on this day 75 years ago: vivacious bad girl, writer, go-go dancer, advice columnist, art critic, drug dealer, globe-trotter and avant-garde New York scene-maker Cookie Mueller (née Dorothy Karen Mueller, 2 March 1949 – 10 November 1989). She’s a fiercely charismatic presence in early John Waters "gutter films" like Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974). Her close confidante, photographer Nan Goldin would describe Mueller as “the most fabulous woman I’d ever seen ... She was the starlet of the Lower East Side: a poetess, a short-story writer, she starred in John Waters’ early movies. She was sort of the queen of the whole downtown social scene.” (Unsurprisingly, Goldin has an eye for vivid detail. In the wrenching 2022 documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, she recalls that the first time she met Cookie in Provincetown in the 1970s, Mueller was wearing vintage Springolator heels held together with safety pins!). I highly recommend investigating Mueller’s wry and elegant autobiographical musings like Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black or Garden of Ashes (recently reissued) – or Chloe Griffin’s excellent 2014 biography Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller. Pictured: portrait of Mueller by Bob Berg.