Failing.

Photographs by Mike Brodie.

Twin Palms Publishers, Santa Fe, 2024. 412 pp., 193 four-color plates printed on uncoated paper, 8½x11".

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2024 by:

Christian Patterson

LTD is an edition of 300 numbered copies signed by the artist with a 5x7" print laid in at random, presented in a custom slipcase

Mike Brodie’s first monograph, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, touched down more than 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.”
If A Period of Juvenile Prosperity 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. 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.
Michael Brodie (born 1985) is the author of A Period of Juvenile Prosperity (2013) and Tones of Dirt and Bone (2015). He lives with his girlfriend in Biloxi, Mississippi, where the railroad is never far, just hidden in the trees from view. Unseen, it rattles the windows and floors of their apartment every time a train passes through.

Ordering Information

Out-of-stock books are available to backorder from photo-eye.

Cat# DU900S Softbound $85.00 (978-1-936611-23-2)
Pre-order this item, due January 2025. More Info

Cat# DU900L Limited Edition $155.00 (978-1-936611-23-2)
Pre-order this item, due January 2025. More Info

Quantity:

Other recent books by Mike Brodie

Our customers who bought this also purchased

Masonry OFF