Mike Brodie’s decade-long journey across the fringes of America is a raw and intimate chronicle of transient life, filled with poignant stories of the people he met along the way. His first monograph, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, published over a decade ago, captured the wild and rebellious spirit of his fellow rail-riders and drifters, chasing freedom with abandon. As Danny Lyon noted in Aperture, “Brodie leapt into the life of picture-making as if he was the first to do it.” This was followed by Tones of Dirt and Bone, a collection of earlier SX-70 Polaroid images Brodie took when his photography first led him to hopping freights, earning him the nickname “The Polaroid Kidd.” After this, Brodie seemed to vanish from the art world as mysteriously as he had appeared, stepping away to pursue a different path. “I was divorcing myself from all that,” he reflects. “I was growing up. I was pursuing this other life.”
While A Period of Juvenile Prosperity evoked a cinematic dream, Brodie’s latest work, Failing, is a stark awakening—a brutally honest photographic diary of a decade shaped by love, heartbreak, loss, and grief. It documents the darker side of the American dream, capturing the chaotic realities of addiction, death, and life on society’s margins. Brodie’s camera remains a witness to the fleeting beauty found in forgotten places—whether in desolate open country or in the lives of hitchhikers and kindred wanderers, united by the unspoken bond of the road. Though often steeped in darkness, Failing resonates with moments of grace, as Brodie’s lens continues to find strange and transient beauty in the shadows of the American landscape.
Michael Brodie: Failing
Category: Photographer Monographs & Art Books
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Author: Michael Brodie
Publisher: Twin Palms Publishers
Publication Date:
2024
Print Length: 412 pages
Language: English
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