Melissa Auf der Maur Announces New Book My ’90s Rock Photographs

Melissa Auf der Maur spent the Nineteen Nineties with a bass slung over her shoulder and a digital camera by no means removed from attain. Three many years later, this fall, the archive she quietly constructed alongside the best way turns into a e-book.

My ’90s Rock Photographs, out September eighth through DelMonico Books and the Art Gallery of Ontario, collects greater than 200 photographs 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 final analog decade, and it doubles as an intimate self-portrait of a younger artist transferring via various rock at its peak.

Buy My ’90s Rock Photographs

Before she was a rock star, Auf der Maur studied images at Concordia University in her native Montreal, the place a professor launched her to the looking self-portraits of Francesca Woodman. She saved the apply alive on the street via a single standing request at each cease, asking for a roll of 35mm movie backstage at every venue on her rider. Using self-timers and cable releases, she additionally managed to {photograph} herself in the course of performances, constructing an archive of greater than 10,000 photographs lengthy earlier than smartphones flattened everybody into the identical feed.

Related Video

The choice of photographs runs from the well-known to the offhand. There are candids with Pavement, Sonic Youth, and Beck, a limousine experience with Drew Barrymore, downtime on the set of the “Celebrity Skin” video, and a tiny Frances Bean Cobain with a toy guitar slung round her neck. Auf der Maur was additionally commissioned by Spin to shoot Lollapalooza in 1995 and the Tibetan Freedom Concert in 1996. Threaded all through the gathering is her self-documentation, which reads as selfies a decade earlier than the phrase existed.

The 240-page hardcover pairs the pictures with Auf der Maur’s personal writing, together with a mirrored image titled “End of Analogue” that turns the last decade’s promise right into a reckoning with the digital period that adopted. Elsewhere, she recounts discovering a temperamental Russian panoramic digital camera in a German store throughout the Smashing Pumpkins farewell tour, a hit-or-miss machine that shredded most negatives and sometimes delivered a treasure. Contributors embody critic Ann Powers and curators Sophie Hackett and Jim Shedden, alongside a dialog between Auf der Maur and R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe.

The e-book arrives in tandem with an exhibition of the identical identify on the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. It opens to members on September 2nd and to the general public on September eighth, working via June 2027, and gathers her images alongside video, tour ephemera, and a brand new immersive set up referred to as Bass Womb Room, a 360-degree setting of picture and sound scored by Auf der Maur herself. A public e-book signing will observe on September ninth, and he or she returns to the gallery’s Walker Court for a reside efficiency on January fifteenth, 2027.

Taken collectively, the e-book and the present make a fittingly analog argument that probably the most lasting file of a scene is the one somebody bothered to seize by hand, body by body. Melissa Auf der Maur’s My ’90s Rock Photographs is at the moment out there for pre-order.

The upcoming launch and occasion cap a banner yr for Auf der Maur, who printed her memoir Even the Good Girls Will Cry: A ’90s Rock Memoir through Da Capo Press earlier this yr and was on tour in assist of the work over spring.

Auf der Maur lately caught up together with her former Smashing Pumpkins bandmate on his podcast, the place the 2 regarded again on their shared historical past. Read about her dialog with Billy Corgan on The Magnificent Others.