Mike
Brodie came to public
attention in 2004 after he started posting pictures online under the alias the Polaroid Kid. Back then, his story seemed
too good to be true: a drifter with a Polaroid camera who captured the
itinerant lives of the photogenic young people he met as he rode freight trains
across the US.
Those early shots of kids who looked
like hipster hobos were unashamedly romantic, and made all the more so by their
soft Polaroid colours. Initially, Brodie shot on a Polaroid SX-70, given to him
by a friend (the first picture he took was of his BMX bike). When the company
stopped producing film, he switched to a Nikon F3, all the while creating
homemade photobooks. “Brodie leapt into the life of picture-making as if he was
the first to do it,” wrote the photographerDanny
Lyon. “He was doing what he loved, and he did it compulsively.”
Brodie’s Nikon pictures were published in his book A
Period of Juvenile Prosperity, by the art-publishing house Twin
Palms.
It all began in 2003 when, on a whim, Brodie dropped out of high
school in Florida and rode a freight train to see how far it would take him.
Only three days later, he was back home, but the lure of the hobo lifestyle
kept calling. He rode the rails illegally, off and on, for the next five years.
“A lot of the kids I knew have since gone back to their old lives,” he
told me in 2013. “It was something they did, for whatever reason,
before they settled down. Some were running away, some were out for adventure.
It’s like being homeless by choice.”
Brodie acknowledges the issue of whether
this kind of subject matter should be repackaged in expensive artbook form or
hung on gallery walls. “You have two worlds colliding right there,” he said.
Most of his subjects, he had said, were happy the photos were finding an
audience.
Two worlds also collide in his new book, Tones
of Dirt and Bone, featuring photographs – many of which are
Polaroids – taken between 2004 and 2006. They seem more considered, more
artfully poetic even, than those in his previous collection. Brodie has an
unerring eye for haunting landscapes and even more haunting – sometimes haunted
– faces. A
girl in a fur hat stares
sideways at his camera, her grazed face and chapped lips suggesting a hard life
lived at considerable cost. On the opposite page, though, a
boy with long hair in a peaked cap and hippy threads could easily come from the cover of an
album byDevendra Banhart. Brodie’s Polaroid
romanticism is his great strength, but you wonder if it sometimes conceals more
than it illuminates about the hard lives of his subjects. His photos walk the
line between pure tenderness and true grit, and one cannot help sensing that
there is a degree of mythologising at work.
But there is much to admire. Self-taught
and naturally talented, Brodie often homes in on telling details: an
adolescent neck dappled with love bites; a child’s
small battered boot tucked
between the even more battered boots of a parent; alone
wooden cross, strewn with flowers and soft toys, with the word “SON”
handwritten on it. These are the fragments he has gathered in his itinerant
existence, each one a signifier of a community beyond the realms of traditional
society.
There is a melancholy undertow to his best pictures – a sense of
loss, and a sense of lives surrendered to drift, survival and danger. The
objects and landscapes he photographed all carry a similar sense of mystery: a
bunch of leafy flowers, or a dead bird held in an outstretched hand;
a railway
track or a wintery road disappearing into the horizon. Everything is bathed in the soft,
nostalgic tones that made Polaroid film such an evocative medium.
These days, Mike Brodie has settled
down. He lives with his wife, Celeste, in California, where he works as a
mechanic. In Tones of Dirt and Bone, he wrote: “The photos? I want people to
see them just as I want to tell someone a good story … And when I’m dead, maybe
my lungs will still be around, with some words beneath: ‘Everything comes as a
surprise – thank God.’”
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