If Michael Brodie’s first monograph 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 — biblical in its scope, and in its search for truth and meaning. 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.
In Nashville he became a diesel mechanic. Fell in love. Moved across the country again. Got married. Bought land on the long dusty Winnemucca road Johnny Cash sang about. Started his own business. Built a house. Put down roots. And when that life exploded, the open road called again. Throughout almost all of it, his cameras were with him, and at last those pictures are coming to light.
A Period of Juvenile Prosperity / 2013 / Twin Palms Publishers
At the age of 17, Mike Brodie hopped his first train close to home in Pensacola, Florida, thinking he would visit a friend in Mobile, Alabama. Instead, the train took him in the opposite direction to Jacksonville, Florida. Days later he rode the same train home, arriving back where he started.
Nonetheless, it sparked something in him and he began to wander across America by any means that were free - walking, hitchhiking, and train hopping. Shortly after his travels began he found a camera stuffed behind a car seat and began to take pictures. Brodie spent years crisscrossing the U.S., documenting his experiences, now appreciated as one of the most impressive archives of American travel photography.
A Period of Juvenile Prosperity was named the best exhibition of the year by Vince Aletti in Artforum; and cited as one of the best photo books of 2013 by The Guardian, The New York Times, The Telegraph, and American Photo; it was short-listed for the Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award.
“This book is as powerful a record of America in need of a bath and our lust for the road as has ever been done.” –Danny Lyon
On finding an abandoned Polaroid camera stuffed behind a car seat in 2004, Brodie began to produce a sprawling document of his journey riding the rails across the expanse of North America, alongside a tight-knit community of young punks and hobos, all searching for an authentic experience of the life less ordinary.
This new collection of masterfully reproduced polaroids was made by Brodie when travelling under the name The Polaroid Kid.
The 50 polaroids are presented in a bespoke silkscreened grey-board case, fastened by a heavy gauge elastic band - a design inspired by the punk ethos that the people pictured lived by, and the utilitarian train cars in which they ride.
Although this publication is visually based on Mike Brodie's unpublished body of work of "A Period of Juvenile Prosperity," and although we recognize the same atmosphere as in that book, Soup is not an epilogue. Here, the protagonist of the photographer's most famous and mainstream photo is given a voice, and through his fleeting stories, he undermines the last remnants of the reader's comfort zone. Because Soup is a nickname behind which hides not only an adventurer, but above all a writer and a creative mind tormented by an aggressive form of schizophrenia.
If A Period of Juvenile Prosperity is an iconic and cinematic book that marked a before and after in the story of American subcultures, Soup, on the other hand, embodies the retaliation of mythology on the icon. And if the after coincides with the immediate availability we are forced to accept (with the inevitable death of adventure for its own sake), the before returns to the attack using the same tools that wrote its end. A resurrected executioner.
80 pages, color and bw.
The Slack Trilogy is Mike Brodie's and Mia Justice Smith’s first and only project outside the big publishing house circuit. It is an intimate and insoluble, almost subjective logbook inside the life of Mia Justice Smith aka "Slack," Mike's life and travel companion who died prematurely in 2022 of an overdose at only 23 years old. All copies are hand-numbered on an aluminum plate, and copies of volumes 1 and 2 are signed.
In the early 2000s, Mike Brodie first found his way into photography via the SX-70 camera. It was the last gasp of the golden era of Time-Zero, and the film was Brodie’s gateway. It was expensive, ten sheets to a roll, but he appreciated its inherent limitations; its idiosyncrasies, the way it brought out the tones of the railroad. He liked the way you could manipulate the surface of the film, the feel of the Polaroid, the smell of the toxic emulsion. Sometimes, it seemed like a living, breathing thing. Brodie wasn’t alone: Walker Evans, Andy Warhol, Ansel Adams, and Helmut Newton all praised the SX-70. Like Warhol, Brodie gravitated to the model mostly for portraits. In Brodie’s case, the pictures he made of people he met while riding freights, from Pensacola, Florida to New Orleans, to Washington, and along the way.
“Technically Time Zero was the best fucking film ever made,” Brodie says. None of it would last. Made between 2004 and 2006, as the SX-70 and Time Zero were being phased out of production, and before the photos of his first monograph, Brodie's photographs in Tones of Dirt and Bone feel deliberate, precious, and fleeting.
Six by Six comprises 36 books and 36 original signed photographs. Each title in the series is limited to 100 hand-numbered copies, printed on our exclusive heavyweight Japanese paper and bound in Japanese cloth. Each book contains a separate exhibition-quality original print, numbered and signed by the artist, on 11 x 14 inch paper.
Set 6, the final set in the series, was published in 2016, and includes the following titles:
Roger Ballen, Appearances, Disappearances, Reappearances
Mike Brodie, August 29th–September 8th 2012, Oakland, Ca–Oakland Ca, United States
Jim Goldberg, Ruby Every Fall
Katy Grannan/Hannah Hughes, The Glint of Light on Broken Glass
Idris Khan, Church Walk
Marilyn Minter, Florida 1969