Melissa Auf der Maur Shot Nearly Ten Thousand Frames on Tour With Hole

Melissa Auf der Maur joined Hole in 1994 at twenty two and carried a camera for most of the decade that followed, first with Hole and then the Smashing Pumpkins, accumulating nearly ten thousand photographs of dressing rooms, buses, soundchecks and fans in an era before phones. Iva Dixit reads that archive against the current appetite for nineties nostalgia, and finds the period's actual cynicism rather than the warm version being sold back. Auf der Maur did not revisit the negatives until 2020. Two hundred of them now hang at the Art Gallery of Ontario, following a memoir published in March.