Melissa Auf der Maur has declared 2026 her year of “mid-life resurrection/purging of the ‘90s/sharing the magic of the last analog decade.” The 54-year-old former bassist for Hole and Smashing Pumpkins is making good on that goal with a multimedia memoir project that kicked off in March with her bestselling book “Even the Good Girls Will Cry.” This week, the visual companion: “My ‘90s Rock Photographs,” a photo exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario featuring video and artifacts from Auf der Maur’s three decades of indie rock stardom.
Born in Montreal, Auf der Maur left her photography studies at Concordia and joined Hole at 22 in the midst of chaos; Hole frontwoman Courtney Love’s husband Kurt Cobain had died a few months earlier, followed by the band’s bass player Kristen Pfaff. As she embarked on a world tour, Auf der Maur documented everything she was experiencing, partly because “it was a connection to the girl I abandoned back home,” she said in an interview. The camera also acted as a shield. “It was a protective force field between me and the mania,” said Auf der Maur. “Sh — was happening so quickly that the only way I would stand a chance to process it eventually was to take a picture, capture it and deal with it later.”
Now, 30 years on, and deeply concerned about “the digital detachment of humanity,” Auf der Maur is using her own analog archives as a reminder of both a time before smartphones and a call to action: “Having a multidisciplinary reflection of how we once lived is my way of sharing the beauty, and hopefully manifesting more of that to come.”
Below, Auf der Maur highlights five photos from the AGO exhibit.
The Moment Before
“This is backstage at Lollapalooza 1995. Hole was about to go on stage. I had a pre-show ritual where I tried to photograph most of the audiences we played to every night, but also capture the band in the moment where we’re stepping onstage. This is us all ready to go in the mirror of the dressing room, and it also — in another frame of this exact moment — is the cover of the book. I like it because it is candid, casual, but also part of a ritual (when) you start to feel an adrenalin rush, and you’re preparing for this other kind of presentation of yourself. So there’s a little magic percolating before the show. That Lollapalooza tour was the end of an era, when the alternative music bubble burst. That lineup at Lollapalooza — Beck, Pavement, Cypress Hill, Sonic Youth — was such an incredible last moment of true independent spirit. All of those bands had come from the underground and risen up together, and all sounded different, and it was the tipping point. After ‘95, the corporate greed had begun to get their hands on us, and also had started plucking artists from nothing to mega fame, and it started warping. It started getting way less pure and innocent and I like the innocence in this photo.”
Stage Presence
“This was my most common view of a show day, as the bass player to the right of a singer, Courtney, standing behind her, supporting her, and her leading the charge of Hole and songs and the voice. And then the visual of a big blue sky and an expansive audience — it looks like it could be an ocean or a landscape. It’s always very powerful… it is no less commanding than the ocean. Shooting an audience is honouring this expansive, what I call the cosmos. And the bass is what a crowd moves to. When you’re creating the heartbeat of a moving ocean of people, it is very powerful.”
Coming of Age
“This is a self-portrait taken in 1993 as an art student in Montreal, in a cracked mirror in my university apartment on Saint-Dominique. It’s the beginning of me coming into my 20s, into my practice, my photography, getting used to my reflection in mirrors. In this, I’m not looking in the viewfinder. Now everybody just shoots with their phone, but in the original days of cameras, you looked through a viewfinder, framed your frame… In the study of photography, which is the mystery of light, photography is nothing but the art of light, and the way it bounces off of a surface onto a piece of film, and then back onto a piece of paper. This is a pure moment in light on film to paper, and a young woman determined to use photography as her self-expression and agency to show the world as she sees it. Prior to this is a very shy person. Photography was my first love, because it was a safe place I could hide behind a frame, behind a photo, behind a lens.”
Tourist In My Own Life
“I would have been in Hole for less of a year and I had gone from a black and white art student photography practice, processing my own film, going into the dark room. I shifted as my life changed, my subject changed. It was now me on a stage, or me on tour, and my medium also had to change, so I went from a manual camera to a point-and-shoot camera so that I can quickly capture things. In a way, I became a tourist in my own life.
This is a real classic tourist photo. I’m wearing the fuzzy headphones for the Graceland audio tour. And I’m capturing a deceased cultural icon as an innocent young woman newly finding her place in pop culture. Imagine Kurt has been dead for less than a year. He becomes our generation’s Elvis, both a star and a tragic fallen angel. It’s all of these things in one frame. It’s a reflection on tragic stars that burn out and die too young. It is a colourful, beautiful place. It is the innocence of a young girl, feeling the sun in her face.”
Honouring the fans
“This is on the Live Through This tour. As I started using the point-and-shoot camera and photographing every audience I played, backstage and hotel rooms, I began to turn the camera on fans leaving a venue. There was a group of fans waiting backstage. This was, I think, one of the first times I saw in a photo how they reacted up close and personal when I turned the camera on them. This is the moment where I understood why I was doing this: I was doing this for women for the future, for my daughter, who’s a teenager now. They came to see us play, they waited outside to meet us. And when I turned my little camera on them, the joy and bliss (from) these beautiful girls defined why I do what I do. I used my film to capture and honour them.”
