Melissa Auf der Maur’s Photographs of the “Last Analogue Decade”

As Melissa Auf der Maur opens an exhibition of photographs from her years inside Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins, she reflects on life behind the scenes, the trust that made the images possible and what her generation lost along the way

In her 2026 memoir, Even the Good Girls Will Cry, Melissa Auf der Maur writes at length about her lifelong shyness and the empowering experience of capturing the world around her through a camera. When I meet her at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where she’s setting up for her solo exhibition My ‘90s Rock Photographs, she’s soft-spoken and gracious, but without the slightest trace of mauvaise honte. Melissa tells it like it is.

“It was clear that I knew shit was happening,” she tells me, as we look at blown-up photographs of Courtney Love and Billy Corgan, as well as a slew of other familiar faces from the era. “I knew [Hole] deserved a trustworthy documentarian and our generation deserved it, too, as did our music scene. And I feel a commitment to sharing my observations of what I witnessed and what good and bad things I saw unfold due to corporate rising evil forces [and] eventually digital forces. I knew history was happening and that I was just a mere human who could never truly process what was happening unless I photographed, photographed, photographed, obsessively documenting so that I could unpack it later for others and for myself.”

And photograph she did. While the show features a couple of hundred photographs taken between the early Nineties – when a fortuitous meeting with Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan eventually led to her joining Love’s band, Hole – and late 2000, when the Pumpkins, whom she later joined, disbanded, Melissa’s vault is far larger. “My archive is 15,000 photographs, all printed, and then we had to scan them and reduce them to like, 200, which was the hardest thing of this entire memoir project. … I’d sit on my hotel bed on a day off [in the Nineties] and just sort of, like, spread all the photos out and try to make sense of it all.”

Gazing at a glamorous Drew Barrymore in the back seat of a car and a barefoot Love on a bicycle, I’m curious about the timing of the show. Why now? “I was about to turn 50, and my daughter was about to turn 10,” she says about beginning her memoir. “It was time for me to unpack on my own that decade, which was overwhelming and exciting, but also very painful, both on a personal and on a generational level.” Their release 25 years later has given her enough distance to see the period differently. “I’d say the perfect amount of time had passed for a cultural reflection.”

While the photographs certainly capture the spirit of grunge, and, to a degree, the Nineties in general, it’s Melissa’s perspective and position that truly give them weight. “Having a photographer in the band [who’s] a woman … is obviously my unique angle”, she points out. “I’m not a girlfriend of a band member. I’m not a boy in a band. I’m a girl in a band.” There’s also the fact that she was in many instances the only one with a camera, at a time when analogue was the norm. “I’m the only person in this entire stadium taking a picture at this minute,” Melissa says as we examine one of the many concert photographs on view. “That is a huge deal. The press photographers only had the first three songs in the pit. No one in the band had [a camera].”

Surrounded by all these impromptu pictures – of Love, in particular – I recall one of David Bowie’s publicists telling me how the ‘man who fell to Earth’ was very protective of his image and the way he was photographed. What was Love like in this respect? “She has big issues of self-presentation,” Melissa says, “but she's also the most raw, open, screaming, crying human, so she’s not vain in that superficial way. But mostly, I think what comes across in this collection is that she trusts me as she should, because I love her and I'm not going to make her look bad. I’m going to show the truth. She knows that we’re guardians of each other’s souls, so she’s not going to be concerned about what photos I show.”

I also think about Melissa’s fly-on-the-wall approach in general (interestingly, her German surname translates to ‘off the wall’ in English). Was it ever considered invasive? “No, because they all trusted me,” she says resolutely. “I mean, at this point, it’s pretty obvious I’m not doing anything for fame, money or glory. I’m doing it because I’m a human being on the quest of, like, why do we exist? How do we experience the world?” She continues, “No one in my story thinks that I’m, like, trying to make a buck of anything. Nor am I trying to be, nor am I career-oriented. I'm just expression-oriented.”

If these photographs – as well as artefacts and home video footage, inter alia – are an ode to what Melissa calls the ‘last analogue decade’, it’s one that’s bittersweet. If the bitterness isn’t totally apparent in the images, which will likely prompt many Gen-Xers to wax nostalgic, it’s more than apparent in her memoir and in what Melissa tells me. “I fucking cared about what was happening with my generation. We were being co-opted into a corporate greed machine, and some people didn’t survive. Some people lost their souls. Many people lost their way. We totally lost our entire organic, magical, DIY underground evolution. I knew we were in the end times of something. So, I think [right now] there’s both a natural reflection [on] the romantic former way of living as well as the authentic, true, passionate, raging voices of our generation who were warning, like, ‘This shit is gonna get stolen by these corporate greedy assholes.’ And we were right.”

My ’90s Rock Photographs is open now at the Art Gallery of Ontario.