Mike Brodie - Maus Contemporary

Mike Brodie Failing

Mike Brodie’s first monograph, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity touched down more than a 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.”

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.

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.

- Rebecca Bengal

Born 1985 in Mesa, Arizona, Mike Brodie began photographing when he was given a Polaroid camera in 2004. Working under the moniker 'The Polaroid Kidd,' Brodie has spent years traveling the United States, amassing an archive of photographs that make up one of the few, true collections of American travel photography. Brodie made work in the tradition of photographers like Robert Frank, William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, but due to never having undergone any formal training he always remained untethered to the pressures and expectations of the art market.

Brodie compulsively documented his exploration of the tumultuous world of transient subcultures without regard to how the photographs would exist beyond him. After feeling as though he documented all that he could of his subject, his insatiable wanderlust found a new passion, and as quickly as he began making photographs, he appeared to walk away from the medium in pursuit of new adventures.

In 2008, Brodie received the Baum Award for American Emerging Artists and has a forthcoming book, Failing, to be published this November by Twin Palms Publishers. Failing is Brodie's most recent book after A Period of Juvenile Prosperity in 2013 and Tones of Dirt and Bone in 2015.

click to access Mike's complete Bio and CV

Please join us Friday, January 10, 2025 (6-8pm) at Maus Contemporary for a book signing event during the opening reception of the exhibition MIKE BRODIE: FAILING.