Marilyn Minter was a photography student at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, in 1969. She had just shown her fellow students the proof sheets from a series of black-and-white photographs of her mother, a glamorous drug addict and recluse, taken when visiting her one weekend at the Coral Ridge Towers, an apartment complex near Fort Lauderdale. The photographs look like stills from a late Joan Crawford or Bette Davis movie.