Inside the grunge golden age with Hole’s former bassist
My ’90s Rock Photographs — Melissa Auf der Maur’s new photobook is a sprawling visual memoir of her time at the heart of the US scene, from Tinker to The Smashing Pumpkins.
As musician Melissa Auf der Maur saw her 50th birthday on the horizon, she knew the time had finally come to set the first half of her life to memoir and monograph. “I wanted to heal and purge from the most dramatic decade of my life,” she says of the 1990s. After releasing Even the Good Girls Will Cry this spring, Auf der Maur returns with the new exhibition and book, Melissa Auf der Maur: My ’90s Rock Photographs, an intoxicating portrait of the artist as a young woman on the world stage.
After a serendipitous series of events that began with a thrown beer bottle, Auf der Maur’s indie band Tinker opened for Smashing Pumpkins in 1993. Following their set, frontman Billy Corgan took her aside and said, “One day you will play in my band.” In response, Auf der Maur whipped out her camera and snapped a picture of the two cheek to cheek, preserving the prophecy in an intimate silver gelatin print.
One year later, Auf der Maur got the call: Courtney Love wanted her to join Hole for the Live Through This Tour, replacing original bassist Kristen Pfaff, who had died that June at age 27 from a heroin overdose. Auf der Maur demurred, but Love was undeterred, demanding, “Say no to my face – and bring your bass.” Two weeks later, Auf der Maur joined Hole on stage at Reading Festival, the seventh time she had ever played a live gig.
Auf der Maur rose to the challenge, drawing inspiration from her lifelong practice of keeping a diary and taking photographs as a documentarian. “Those practices protected me and preserved my memory. It was how I could feel I had agency over my life,” she says. “To be quite honest, my life was out of control. I wasn’t the band leader. I wasn’t the big machine pushing the bands on stage. I was just a young girl attached to the ride, trying not to drown. I took agency in my life, and I documented, photographed, and reflected. I would turn the camera on me and send messages to myself in the future like ‘I have no, no fucking idea what’s happening, but you’re going to understand it later.’”
In the wake of Kurt Cobain’s death earlier that April and the media frenzy surrounding Courtney Love, Auf der Maur recognised history unfolding around her. “I always knew what I was photographing was for the future,” she says. “I knew the world we lived in was changing. Corporate forces had co-oped youth culture and sold our magic as consumer products. Of course, the world is always changing but for that brief moment, all of our rage, fears, and passion ran through that roaring rock music. We were like canaries in the coal mine.”
As the mother of a teen girl, Auf der Maur holds faith in a better future guided by connections that transcend generations embedded in community and collectivism – and the fires that once lit the world aflame still roars. “We can all agree that the way we live is warped and merged with tech monoliths and war mongers, and all we have is us,” she says. “I am writing this for all the freaks, others, artists, and sensitive poets so that we can find each other.”
Melissa Auf der Maur: My ’90s Rock Photographs is on view through June 6, 2027, at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Canada. The catalogue is published by Art Gallery of Ontario/DelMonico Books. Even the Good Girls Will Cry: My ’90s Rock Memoir is published by Atlantic.
Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.
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