Melissa Auf der Maur’s 1990s Rock Photographs Debut at Art Gallery of Ontario

Key facts

• Melissa Auf der Maur: My ’90s Rock Photographs opened this September at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), displaying two hundred photographs from her personal archive.
• Her memoir, Even the Good Girls Will Cry: A ’90s Rock Memoir, was published this past March.
• In 1994, at twenty-two, Auf der Maur initially rejected Billy Corgan’s attempt to recruit her to Hole after bassist Kristen Pfaff’s death, hesitating until Courtney Love persuaded her.
• She was a photography student at Concordia University and taught herself camera use by photographing herself nude in her bedroom.
• She spent nearly a decade as bassist for Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins, taking nearly ten thousand photographs with a 28mm point-and-shoot Nikon.
• The photographs remained in her attic in upstate New York until 2020, when she revisited them while working on her memoir.
• The images include a self-portrait on the set of Hole’s Celebrity Skin (1998) cover shoot and behind-the-scenes shots from the “Malibu” music video set, where the fires were real.
• Sophie Hackett is AGO’s curator of photography; the article originally appeared in Aperture No. 264, “Stop Time,” under the column Redux.