Mike Brodie – Untitled Frame from A Period of Juvenile Prosperity (200X)

Brodie was born in Arizona circa 1985.

Next we hear from him, it’s 2002. He’s 17 and now lives in Pensacola, FL.

He gets it in his head to visit a friend in Mobile and hops a train–as luck would have it–headed in the opposite direction. He ends up in Jacksonville, FL.

After bumming around for a few days, he catches the same train home.

“[The experience] sparked something and Brodie began to wander across the U.S. by any means that were free – walking, hitchhiking and train hopping.”

In 2004, Brodie found a Polaroid camera stuffed behind a car seat. Sans any formal training, Brodie criss-crossed the States using the camera to document his travels. .

In an effort to stay in contact the transient communities he came into with, Brodie shared his images on various websites; becoming known as The Polaroid Kidd.

When Polaroid discontinued the stock his camera used, he switched to a sturdy camera of 1980’s vintage.

On the subject of his process, he’s said:

Sometimes I take a train the wrong way or… whatever happens a photo will come out of it, so it doesn’t really matter where I end up.

Unwilling to be chewed up by the pressures and expectations of the art market, in 2008 Brodie ceased making photographs.

He graduated from the Nashville Auto Diesel College (NADC) in 2012 and now works out of his silver ‘93 Dodge Ram.as a mobile diesel mechanic.

A Period of Juvenile Prosperity was published in early 2013 by Twin Palms.

(Note: there are two biographies for Brodie–his publisher’s version and his personal website’s. Both feature a wealth of information but are bogged down by choppy, artless prose; the versions are riddled with contradictions. The preceding text is not original; All I did was to reconcile the information contained in both versions in order to present it with as few changes to the original language as possible. I repeat: the preceding text is not original.)