Melissa auf der Maur Recalls Photographing Courtney Love on Hole's 1995 Lollapalooza Tour

Melissa auf der Maur, the Canadian musician and photographer who played bass in Hole, has discussed a photograph she took of Courtney Love applying makeup during the band's 1995 Lollapalooza tour. The image is featured in her rock photo book, which she compiled from her personal archives. Auf der Maur described the shot as part of her effort to document her generation being co-opted by corporate greed and upended after the death of Kurt Cobain. While assembling the book, she also rediscovered her first self-portrait, taken when she was 13 at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris in front of Jim Morrison's grave during a trip with her father. She said that photograph established a pattern for all her later work: asserting control over her surroundings. Photography, she explained, was the first thing that gave her a sense of agency and became a private universe she could rely on. Music later diverted her, introduced to her by radical women and a countercultural movement, but the subject of her photographs simply shifted to her own life on stage and backstage with Hole. The book collects these images.