Long before her professional career, Melissa Auf der Maur found her voice through photography. As a 13-year-old on a trip to Paris, she captured a self-portrait at Jim Morrison’s grave, an experience she describes as her first attempt to take agency over her environment. That creative spark evolved during her time in the band Hole, where her role as a bass player offered an intimate perspective on a volatile, rapidly changing music scene. She saw her camera as a tool to document a generation being influenced by corporate shifts and the profound impact of Kurt Cobain’s death. I am a 13-year-old on an awkward trip with my cool father. Not an outside male photographer – I was able to glean the essence of that band through that misunderstood and wildly celebrated, but also dismantl, in terms of my duty as a female photographer in Hole – not a girlfriend. Photography was the absolute first thing that gave me a feeling of having my own say. One that I could trust, it became a way of creating my own universe. So the subject of my photographs just changed, i was sidetracked into music in a beautiful way by these radical women and a countercultural movement. On stage with Hole, backstage with these luminary, wild people, travelling across the world, it was me within this environment.
During the Lollapalooza 1995 tour, Auf der Maur balanced her duties as a performer with the task of documenting the experience for Spin magazine, which had requested a tour diary from Courtney Love. At 23, she used a Nikon point-and-shoot with a wide-angle lens, finding it better suited for the fast-paced life on the road than her manual equipment. This choice allowed her to capture both the expansive festival crowds and the personal, quiet moments behind the scenes, such as the photograph of Love applying makeup before a show. Where this photo was taken, for us to understand later, it was a generational call to document the Lollapalooza ’95 tour.
Auf der Maur describes her portraits of Love as loving and authentic, countering the often misunderstood public narrative surrounding the frontwoman. Despite the pressures of the tour, including the band’s demanding schedule, internal struggles with addiction, and the competitive atmosphere between co-headliners, Auf der Maur notes that the group often felt strong on stage. She highlights that the existence of a full roll of film from that specific day suggests it was a rare moment of happiness and stability during a tumultuous era.
For Auf der Maur, her time with Hole served as the defining experience of that decade, both musically and spiritually. While she later performed with the Smashing Pumpkins and established herself as an art photographer, the nineties era remains central to her identity. She views this period as a time when alternative music culture crossed into the mainstream, a transition she aimed to capture with as much honesty as possible to preserve for future perspective.
Her work is currently compiled in the book “Melissa Auf der Maur: My ’90s Rock Photographs,” published by DelMonico Books. The collection also accompanies a dedicated exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, which is scheduled to run until June 6, 2027. Reflecting on her career, the Montreal-born photographer views her 21st-century midlife return to the medium as a resurrection of sorts, utilizing the constraints of the pre-digital film era to emphasize intention and signature storytelling in her work.
