Michael Brodie: Failing

Brodie's decade-long record of his transient American life, brimming with poignant stories of those he encountered along the way

Mike Brodie's first monograph, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, touched down more than decade ago, depicting his fellow rail-riders and drifters in a rebellious and wildfire pursuit of adventure and freedom. "Brodie leapt into the life of picture-making as if he was the first to do it," Danny Lyon wrote about the book in Aperture. Next came Tones of Dirt and Bone, a collection of earlier SX-70 pictures Brodie made when photography first led him to hopping freights, when he was known as "The Polaroid Kidd." And then Brodie seemed to disappear from the art world as suddenly and mysteriously as he'd first appeared. Maybe his vanishing was another myth. Maybe it was just a necessary retreat. "I was divorcing myself from all that," he says. "I was growing up. I was pursuing this other life."
If A Period of Juvenile Prosperity was a cinematic dream, Failing is the awakening and the reckoning: a raw, wounded and searingly honest photographic diary of a decade marked by love and heartbreak, loss and grief. Here is the flip side of the American dream, seen from within; here is bearing close witness to the brutal chaos of addiction and death; here are front-seat encounters with hitchhikers and kindred wanderers on society's edges, sustained by the ragtag community of the road. Failing often exists in darkness but is tuned to grace. Brodie's eye stays forever open to the strange and fleeting beauty that exists in forgotten places-the open country and the lost horizons that sweep past dust-spattered windows in a spectral blur.
Michael Brodie (born 1985) is the author of A Period of Juvenile Prosperity (2013) and Tones of Dirt and Bone (2015). He lives with his girlfriend in Biloxi, Mississippi, where the railroad is never far, just hidden in the trees from view. Unseen, it rattles the windows and floors of their apartment every time a train passes through.