A Period of Juvenile Prosperity by Mike Brodie (review)

Mike Brodie, aka the Polaroid Kidd, loves trains. Hopping his first train in 2004 at age 18, Brodie has since traveled over 50,000 miles and 46 states. From the very beginning of his time on the road, with a friend’s Polaroid SX-70, he began snapping pictures of his fellow train-hoppers. When that film was discontinued, Brodie adapted, switching to an old 1980s 35mm camera, taking thousands of images, many of which he uploaded onto his own website. People quickly noticed, and by 2008, he had won the Baum Award for emerging artist. Within the next few years, his photos would be shown in galleries from the Yossi Milo in New York to M + BG in Los Angeles; he even has a photo hanging in the Louvre. As his notoriety emerged, he left the road—and photography—and received a degree from Nashville’s Auto Diesel College, hoping to one day work for the railroad.

As he writes in his poetic, staccato two-page description of his life in the end of A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, his beautiful collection of 61 photos published by Twin Palms Publishers, “I don’t want to be famous, but I hope this book is remembered forever.” His photographs, though, are mostly of “forgotten” kids. Gutter punks drinking in abandoned buildings. Bandaged young women sleeping on cardboard near tracks. A tattooed man hanging from a speeding train, enthusiastically flipping off the camera. Brodie’s images speak of a loose collection of punks, hanging out and hanging onto society’s margins, glamorizing the road life even as the photos show us makeshift toilets and bloody underwear. In the images, allusions to Kerouac abound, and it’s no accident that in one photo, Thompson’s The Rum Diary (1998) is used as a makeshift pillow. There is plenty of romance mixed in with the dirt.

As a photography book, it is beautiful. As a social document, much like its subject matter, the book drifts without leaving a mark. For example, in one image, a young African American male is being arrested; two images later, a young blond hair man is in the back of a police car. Is this book linking these two men together as social outcasts? Perhaps. The former, though, does not seem to be part of the train-hopping scene, looking dazed and resigned as he is handcuffed; the latter has the beginning of a smile while staring at the camera. The threads linking them are ideologically bare. Who, also, is the older bearded man sitting in his car and why is he in this particular book of juvenile prosperity? The connections, if any, are hidden and a narrative refuses to form. This is certainly not a criticism of the book as much as a disappointment: Brodie’s photographic eye is sharp and his background makes him a perfect candidate to definitively document, without exploiting, his subjects. Instead, we have a handsome coffee table book. Certainly great, but it is my hope that more photographs, and a memoir, will follow.