I Almost Dimmed The Glow Of Melissa Auf der Maur’s Purpose.
I attended a talk by Melissa Auf der Maur, former bass player for Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins, as well as a photographer and writer. During the talk, Auf der Maur said she never planned to be a musician; she was going to be a photographer, and while studying at Concordia University, as she puts it, she was “hijacked” into playing in the band Hole. “It was actually a bit of a Cinderella story,” she told me later in the evening; they sought her out and had to convince her to take the job.
While on the road for ten years, Auf der Maur never stopped being a photographer, and some of the photos she took from 1990-2001 are in her book My ’90s Rock Photographs
What makes many of the photos so captivating is that they are self-portraits of Auf der Maur; her face off to one corner, with the tough realities of being on the road with a groundbreaking band like Hole in the background. Why self-portraits? It was Auf der Maur’s way to keep herself grounded, in the moment, so she could make sense of the chaos going on around her.
After listening to her speak, walking through the show, and sharing a one-on-one moment with her at the reception, I did what I instinctively do to find meaning in someone's work: I guess their statement of purpose. Auf der Maur’s, from what I took that evening, would be: To create so we are in the moment.
Auf der Maur was very forthcoming that she knew these photos would one day have a meaningful impact beyond the impact they were having on her as she travelled the world; she just had to wait for the right time. 2026 was the right time. Why? Our current, societal, collective inability to be in the moment, driven by technology's addictive nature, pains her because she understands the value of these precious moments from her own experience, using them to hang onto what is true about herself as the addiction, misogyny and destruction swirled around her on the road.
Auf der Maur shows us her purpose not only through her self-portraits but in the photos she tells CBC Q’s host Tom Power are most meaningful to her: the ones of the audience, the ones of the audience, because of “the undivided attention that we had for each other; no one had a phone or camera. It was a sacred experience between the audience and the band; nobody lived anywhere but in that moment.”
Which brings me to the moment I almost dimmed the glow surrounding Auf der Maur when we were talking. The phrase “Can I take a selfie with you?” almost passed through my lips. It still makes me anxious to think about how I would have made her feel if I had followed through on my selfish urge to break the moment we were having just so I could fulfill my own addiction to feeding the world something about myself.
To allow someone to stand in the glow of thier own purpose, to let them know you understand the meaningful impact they are trying to make, and in Auf de Maur’s case, to be in the moment, you have to know what it feels like to stand in the glow of your own personal purpose.
