Melissa Auf der Maur spent the 1990s with a bass slung over her shoulder and a camera never far from reach. Three decades later, this fall, the archive she quietly built along the way becomes a book.
My ’90s Rock Photographs, out September 8th via DelMonico Books and the Art Gallery of Ontario, collects more than 200 images from the musician’s years touring the world with Hole and later the Smashing Pumpkins. It is being billed as a photographic love letter to the last analog decade, and it doubles as an intimate self-portrait of a young artist moving through alternative rock at its peak.
Before she was a rock star, Auf der Maur studied photography at Concordia University in her native Montreal, where a professor introduced her to the searching self-portraits of Francesca Woodman. She kept the practice alive on the road through a single standing request at every stop, asking for a roll of 35mm film backstage at each venue on her rider. Using self-timers and cable releases, she also managed to photograph herself in the middle of performances, building an archive of more than 10,000 images long before smartphones flattened everyone into the same feed.
The selection of images runs from the famous to the offhand. There are candids with Pavement, Sonic Youth, and Beck, a limousine ride with Drew Barrymore, downtime on the set of the “Celebrity Skin” video, and a tiny Frances Bean Cobain with a toy guitar slung around her neck. Auf der Maur was also commissioned by Spin to shoot Lollapalooza in 1995 and the Tibetan Freedom Concert in 1996. Threaded throughout the collection is her self-documentation, which reads as selfies a decade before the word existed.
The 240-page hardcover pairs the photographs with Auf der Maur’s own writing, including a reflection titled “End of Analogue” that turns the decade’s promise into a reckoning with the digital era that followed. Elsewhere, she recounts finding a temperamental Russian panoramic camera in a German shop during the Smashing Pumpkins farewell tour, a hit-or-miss machine that shredded most negatives and occasionally delivered a treasure. Contributors include critic Ann Powers and curators Sophie Hackett and Jim Shedden, alongside a conversation between Auf der Maur and R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe.
The book arrives in tandem with an exhibition of the same name at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. It opens to members on September 2nd and to the public on September 8th, running through June 2027, and gathers her photographs alongside video, tour ephemera, and a new immersive installation called Bass Womb Room, a 360-degree environment of image and sound scored by Auf der Maur herself. A public book signing will follow on September 9th, and she returns to the gallery’s Walker Court for a live performance on January 15th, 2027.
Taken together, the book and the show make a fittingly analog argument that the most lasting record of a scene is the one someone bothered to capture by hand, frame by frame. Melissa Auf der Maur’s My ’90s Rock Photographs is currently available for pre-order.
The upcoming release and event cap a banner year for Auf der Maur, who published her memoir Even the Good Girls Will Cry: A ’90s Rock Memoir via Da Capo Press earlier this year and was on tour in support of the work over spring.
Auf der Maur recently caught up with her former Smashing Pumpkins bandmate on his podcast, where the two looked back on their shared history. Read about her conversation with Billy Corgan on The Magnificent Others.
