Michael B MacDonald

Interesting portraits don’t seem to tell stories, they provoke the viewer to narrate. They are engines of creativity.

This a behind-the-scenes shot from the making of Pimachihowan (2015) - one of my more important films I think and one of my least screened outside of edicational spaces.
filmfreeway.com/projects/918...

Love the way spaces reach out. I was taking photos of umbrellas and it turned into a story about a small restaurant.

A photo never feels like stopped time. Isn’t it a moment that moves into the future living other lives and having other relationships?

The show moves over you. Beer in hand, sweat on the neck, ear plugs in, a photograph gets called into happening.

The lights, the energy, i guess it’s what anthropologist Katherine Stewart meant by atmospheric attunement. It wants to live beyond this moment, the photo is born.

A quiet moment with no audience, no bluster, no show, still hangs in my memory - strangely almost as powerfully as the roar from the stage.

“Every photograph is in fact a means of testing, confirming and constructing a total view of reality” John Berger, 1968.
It’s not just this moment in itself but the way this image feels like that atmosphere.

“Photography is as close to music as to painting…x moment or y moment” John Berger 1968.

“Photography is the process of rendering observation self-conscious” —John Berger (1968) understanding a photograph.
So social media becomes a curated self-consciousness, moments that have past through the first phase of attention and have moved into another phase, performed self-consciousness.

Attending to social media is a lot like making improvisational movies. The double awareness of living now with an artistic attention to the aesthetics of the moment.

Roland Barthes’ said a photo has a studium and punctum - studium is like the genre (rock photo) punctum grabs you.
Touring is about constant movement - the blurred hand and the awkward framing of the second photo grabs me. Which photo do you like better?

I’ve been making films with musicians since 2008 as a popular music researcher. Social media has been around the entire time and I’ve been posting stuff but i haven’t made it a focus in itself - at least not until this tour when the band was like - dude you’re already making content - why not post?

I spent three weeks on the road in Japan with @badbuddyband.bsky.social doing social media - wow I learned a lot - I’m going to start posting photos and reflections as I gear up for my next research grant - would love your feedback

@badbuddyband.bsky.social
they back in edmonton - and they bad!!

Film photography is the romance between light and chemicals

Are you all getting this kind of propaganda?

Coming soon!! My chapter on cineworlding polyMUSICamory

Love teaching this text to music students - the way Massumi develops Bateson ideas about play are so useful for thinking about the complexities of performance

Pensive and wondering how this new social platform will develop