http://www.vogue.it/en/people-are-talking-about/vogue-arts/2013/03/mike-brodie

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2013/01/slide-show-pictures-from-mikebrodies-a-period-of-juvenile-prosperity.html#slide_ss_0=16

11-14-12
Elizabeth I. Johnson, CNN
Editor's note: This story has been updated to include a statement from Operation Lifesaver.
Ten years ago, as a teenager in Pensacola, Florida, Mike Brodie met a bearded, dirty and toughlooking man who was sleeping on a friend’s front porch. During their conversation, the man pointed out a “hot shot,” or high-priority train passing by. Within a week, the adventureseeking Brodie was planning to hop aboard for a free ride.
As he stood waiting for a westbound train headed for Mobile, Alabama, where a friend lived, he grew bored and instead took an eastbound train to Jacksonville, Florida. For days, Brodie hitchhiked and hopped other trains to make his way home again.
His trip marked the beginning of at least a decade of train hopping.
“I got obsessed with riding trains,” Brodie said. But since no one could keep up with the pace at which he wanted to travel, he mostly rode alone, making friends along the way.
As his knowledge of trains, schedules and routes deepened, his “traveling loner moments” continued. In the 10 years since he’s been riding, Brodie traveled more than 50,000 miles across
45 states.
At first, he documented his rides with a Polaroid camera that his friend gave him. But when the company discontinued its film, he switched to 35mm.
He sees his photography as a hobby that “developed into something serious.”
His photographs earned him the Baum Award in 2008 and have been exhibited in several places, including the Louvre in Paris. He has recently compiled some of them into a book, “A
Period of Juvenile Prosperity,” which will be released November 15.
His photographs reveal a subculture of American youth who have the freedom to leave home and travel, including hitchhiking and train riding.

“Everyone does it for different reasons,” Brodie said. Sometimes it turns into homelessness for travelers, but some people need to experience a different life to become well-rounded, he added.
For Brodie, train hopping is exhilarating and scary, but satisfying.
It can be a deadly hobby, however, according to Operation Lifesaver, a non-profit that provides education hoping to prevent collisions, injuries and death on an around railroad tracks that contacted CNN after this article was published.
"Hundreds of people die each year when they needlessly engage in extremely dangerous behavior, such as trespassing on rail tracks or illegally jumping on moving trains," Operation
Lifesaver President Helen Sramek said, suggesting that people heed warning signals to stay off tracks and away from the trains.
While Brodie feels that he learned more about life through his experiences than he would earning his degree right after high school, he’s learning to grow up now, he said. He graduated from mechanic school and is laying roots in Oakland, California. He doesn’t travel as often, but when he does, there is always a loosely constructed plan and the thrill of adventure.
“Photography is an afterthought of the moment,” he said. “The rest is experiences and memories.”
Mike Brodie’s book, "A Period of Juvenile Prosperity," will be released November 15 by Twin
Palms Publishers, with a limited edition provided by TBW Books.
Henry’s dreadlocks blow in the wind, riding southbound 50 miles north of Roseville, California. (Mike Brodie/Twin Palms
Publishers)
A traveler lies in the grass, patiently waiting for a westbound train in Hauser, Idaho. (Mike Brodie/Twin Palms Publishers)

Two transients look at a map in south Florida. (Mike
Brodie/Twin Palms Publishers)
Knowing very well that one day corporate media may share his image with the world, Soup sends a message to society.
(Mike Brodie/Twin Palms Publishers)
Two travelers catch a free ride in coal porters returning to the
Powder River basin, North Dakota. (Mike Brodie/Twin Palms
Publishers)
A young woman rides in style with a used mattress found near the tracks in Dunsmuir, California. (Mike Brodie/Twin Palms
Publishers)
Travelers passed out from intense heat lay inside of an empty coal porter in North Dakota. (Mike Brodie/Twin Palms
Publishers)
A young man defecates from a moving gondola in Florida.
(Mike Brodie/Twin Palms Publishers)

A train hopper marks an empty well car, southbound on "The
Coast Route,” in California. (Mike Brodie/Twin Palms
Publishers)
Riders pass green beans while riding suicide on the Florida
East Coast Railway. (Mike Brodie/Twin Palms Publishers)
Soup is passed out on a Big Gulp drink in the intense summer heat in Phoenix. (Mike Brodie/Twin Palms Publishers)
A traveler rides on the nose of a helper locomotive in
Montana. (Mike Brodie/Twin Palms Publishers)
A young man gets treatment in hospital after breaking his neck from a jump in St. Louis, Missouri. (Mike Brodie/Twin
Palms Publishers)
Stranded during a snowstorm, where Highway 3 crosses the
Norfolk Southern mainline in Gorham, Illinois. (Mike
Brodie/Twin Palms Publishers) http://cnnphotos.blogs.cnn.com/2012/11/14/obsessed-with-train-riding/

STORY BY: Daniel Arnold October 20, 2011
Mike Brodie is settled in the sense that he rents a room that has a closet with clothes hung up, a bookshelf and a radio, but his mind is always moving. The Pensacola kid who got famous snapping Polaroids of coal-dusted drifters getting loose is now a railroad mechanic, repairing fuel injectors on the graveyard shift at a port in Oakland, California.
When the traffic dies down on the nearby harbor streets, Brodie and his crew drive service rigs out to the edge of the yard and watch street racers ripping through tungstenlit exhaust fog on motorcycles until the cops show up to send them home. It’s been more than a year since his last train ride and he doesn’t take too many photos lately.
Since learning diesel mechanics at a Nashville trade school, the former BMX-stunting snotnose pulls an honest paycheck, putting it towards the rent he splits with a couple of rail-working roommates. Though no longer riding them, he still loves trains and has worked hard to stake a legitimate claim on the locomotive business. “Every day is crazy!” Brodie says, at 26 his mildly Southern vowels and easy laugh still plump with goofy teenage enthusiasm. “Crazy stories happen all the time. You don’t have to get on a

coal train for life to be crazy, I’ll tell you that much. In fact, most of the time train riding is fucking boring. But then there are those little apexes.”
Despite growing up by train tracks and catching the occasional flash of slumped riders passing by out his kitchen window, Brodie got his first real look at hobo culture on a blind date with a punk girl who worked at a Chinese restaurant in town. “The date was we were gonna go to a This Bike is a Pipe Bomb show at the End of the Line Cafe, and she was punk with her dyed black hair, and there were these smelly young people dancing around barefoot and I thought, This is so cool! It’s ridiculous, but I don’t know where I’d be without the punk scene.” After that date, Brodie, fascinated, spent all his time studying this weird niche of society from the inside. He heard about train riding soon after and went off to do it.
Brodie’s not a runaway in the sense that he came from a broken home. It’s more like he’s got this fanatical personality, like a real Romeo, who takes up interests with such a fargone passion that you wouldn’t be surprised to see them burn him up whole. He took his first train ride right out of Pensacola two days after picking up a Polaroid camera off a friend who had it gathering dust in her car. He stuffed the camera in a backpack with some stale bagels and, without a word to his girlfriend or mother, headed to a spot downtown where trains came slow around a kind of a bend with the idea that he’d ride west to see a friend in Mobile. But he couldn’t wait. Two hours and some fidgeting later, he was poking his head out of the first train that passed, an eastbound freight that carried him clean across the state of Florida in Jacksonville. “I simply just wanted to ride trains, so I got on a train in my town and rode it!” He was 18.
After that trip, life blew wide open. Brodie took a few photos on the ride to Jacksonville and found himself hooked on both shooting and riding before he even made it home. “I had a lot of curiosity about the world and wanted to go travel. It was an addiction. And photography turned out to be something that just happened naturally for me.” With each successive ride came a new slew of photos, and they were sharp, anthropological things.
He started calling himself the Polaroid Kidd and earned the name with sad-eyed portraits and blurs of barefoot riders, dripping dead-honest loner emotion and ancient looking blues, yellows and reds.
It wasn’t long before the checks started showing up at his mom’s house. He put the photos online and caught the eye of celebrity-darling gallery owner Benjamin Trigano out in LA. They put together an opening at M+B in West Hollywood and before he knew it,
Brodie’s photos were tacked up first on the walls of small galleries, and later, literally, in the Louvre. At this point in most stories, corruption enters holding glitz’ hand and a change comes, but not so for Brodie. He didn’t keep track of the money or particularly care to have it. He gave most of it to his mom and kept riding, his resolve in the face of success owed in part to his time on trains. “If you actually wanna successfully get from point A to point B, you have to do some research and know where you’re going,” he says.
“Otherwise you’re gonna just end up in the middle of nowhere lost and confused. Some people prefer to ride trains that way, but I like to map out routes and stick to them.”

After a few years dodging both responsibility and the law as a full-time trespasser, Brodie began plotting a more disciplined path. He eased off of his reckless addictions, took up studies and some jobs, and started making a new kind of progress. “I have a list of goals,” he says. “I wrote them down! I can tell you them!” The list is mundane but admirable:
Pay off all debts to society, work ten years with the railroad, get a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, establish a 401K, buy a truck and have a kid. When he first took off, Brodie’s mom endlessly begged to know what he was running away from, but it was always more about finding something than escaping. Whether he’s chasing an express train to Chicago, greasing pistons or poring over outlandish math in preparation for school, Brodie’s all about plotting the most efficient path to find himself a life defined by his love of the rails. “That’s how I get energy,” he says. “Pursuing little goals. I think that’s required to be healthy. Keep moving.” http://www.thefader.com/2011/10/20/mike-brodie-a-period-of-juvenile-prosperity/

9/6/11
There was an amazing photo essay floating around several years ago, depicting the life of modern day vagabonds. The visceral and sometimes graphic images documented the lives of a group of young people who had, whether by choice or by circumstance, abandoned “traditional life” in favor of a more transient existence. Recently, Nikki sent me a link to a group of photographs with the note: “you have to see these.” As it turns out, the photos she sent, were taken by Mike Brodie, otherwise known as The Polaroid Kidd, who spent three years of his life riding the rails with a Polaroid SX-70. It was the same set of photographs I had seen years earlier. His photographs depict what he calls “travel culture”, shooting those who live on the fringes of society; train-hoppers, vagabonds, squatters and hobos. By allowing himself to become a part of the culture, Brodie was able to capture photographs that do more than just

document, they also serve as a narrative of his own life, showing intimate details of a life most of us will never even get close to, let alone lead .

http://fadedandblurred.com/blog/american-vagabonds-the-polaroid-kidd/

Friday Sep 2, 2011 by Marina Galperina
At eighteen, self-taught photographer Mike Brodie rode the rails of America, shooting fellow box car hoppers and traveling youths with a Polaroid SX-70. Nicknamed “The Polaroid Kidd,” over the course of three years, the accidental photojournalist captured a segment of American population that lives on the fringes of society whose only necessary comforts are a bonfire, a knife to defend against vermin, and no homestead anchors, save for the occasional communal squat. Not just an artifact of a particular kind of freedom, it’s a document of human bonds, movement itself, and the places you go when you let go.
“Photography has made me what I am. It pulls me in all directions. It gives and takes friends, and pushes me to move miles and miles,” the photographer explains. “My desire to photograph these people in the beginning is what led me to develop such great relationships with them; some being relationships that will last clear on ’til the day I die. I’m really lucky ’cause I never used to be this social.”
Get voyeuristic with our slide show of our favorite Polaroid Kidd shots.

http://flavorwire.com/205957/captivating-photographs-of-punk-hobos-and-hippie-squaters

PREVIOUS
April 14, 2011
Posted by Jessie Wender
This week’s Journeys Issue had me thinking of road trips. Here’s a selection of images inspired by wanderlust.
IN FOCUS: ON THE ROAD
2 OF 10
©Mike Brodie, “#3102” (2007)/Courtesy M+B gallery
“Harrison abstains from sharing his last name,” Brodie told me of the subject of this photo.
“His credit card has a band aid covering his identity. A lot has changed since I took this. We were traveling through the Florida countryside. He has on women’s clothing in this photo.
Not sure why.” http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2011/04/road-trips.html#ixzz29f0Jhrmx

This big, lively show’s subtitle, “Selected
Diaries 1962-2011,” clarifies its focus but doesn’t begin to suggest its stylistic and geographic range. With photographers from
Japan, Israel, Sweden, the U.K., and elsewhere, the take on intensely personal material is reliably diverse—a we-are-the-world vision that veers from sunny to pitch black. Among the highlights:
JH Engstrom’s chronicle of a relationship that includes his partner’s pregnancy and their newborn twins, shown more than life-size moments after their birth; Motoyuki Daifu’s record of cramped, hectic life in the Tokyo apartment he shares with his parents and four siblings; Mike Brodie’s Polaroids taken on the road among America’s disaffected; and cocurator Nick Haymes’s vivid portrait of his rambunctious young family.
Through March 19. (Lombard-Freid Projects, 518 W. 19th St.212-967-8040.)

By ROBERTA SMITH - Published: March 10, 2011
Lombard Freid Projects
518 West 19th Street
Chelsea
Through March 19
In this exhibition of astounding, insistent photographs, the hurly-burly of everyday life often seems inches away from the lens. Organized by Lea Freid, a partner in Lombard-Freid Projects, and the photographer Nick Haymes (whose work is included), it features images by 13 photographers born over a period of nearly 50 years who work in the United States,
Europe or Japan. Most operate in the gap between traditional street photography and postmodern set-up photography.
Their subjects are drawn from real life, and most are captured on the fly, yet with a degree of intimacy — and occasionally staging — that creates its own intense artifice.
The éminences grises here are Walter Pfeiffer of Switzerland, Carl Johan De Geer of Sweden and especially Keizo
Kitajima of Japan, all of whom are represented by black-and-white photographs from the 1970s that document various bohemian or clubgoing subcultures. In his photographs of Bangkok the young Danish photographer Jacob Aue Sobol visibly carries forth Mr. Kitajima’s ink contrasts and gritty textures. Janine Gordon’s rough-and-tumble images of the bicycle jousting contests known as bike kills extend the subculture tradition, as do Mike Brodie’s oddly wistful atmospheric Polaroids, dated 2005, of youths who, like him, continue the American tradition of riding the rails.
The family home itself functions as a kind of overcrowded, often-chaotic stage in the large, candid color images from both the British photographer Nick Waplington’s well-known “Living Room Series,” of the late 1980s, and those taken last year by Motoyuki Daifu, a young Japanese photographer whose work is seen here for the first time in this country.
Things are less claustrophobic but no less bizarre in Mr. Haymes’s images of his extended family (taken over a period of nine years), or Rona Yefman’s of her gorgeous cross-dressing brother.
The Swedish photographer J H Engstrom records his relationship with his wife, focusing on her pregnancy and the birth of their squirming twins with diaristic immediacy worthy of a feature film, while Takashi Homma steps back, with airy images of a young Japanese girl whom he identifies as his daughter, but is not. A similar airiness informs the dreamy sun-shot self-portraits of Hiromix, a Japanese photographer and fashion model with a cultlike following in Japan.
This memorable show’s most valuable lesson is, surprisingly, a formal one: If looked at hard and honestly enough, life can sustain a tremendous range of visual styles as well as emotional sonorities. http://www.nytimes.com/pages/arts/design/index.html

F R I D A Y , J U N E 1 1 , 2 0 1 0
Special #001: Mike Brodie
Mike Brodie a.k.a 'the Polaroid Kid', 1985, USA, is in the first place a freight train hopper. He left home at the age of 18 to ride the trains and travel across the USA. He started taking pictures of his friends and the people that surrounded him with a polaroid sx-70 camera. He has never had any education in photography. Later he also started taking pictures with a 35mm camera. In 2008 he won the Baum award for emerging American photographer. Today Mike Brodie doesn't take pictures anymore, instead he is going to school to become a diesel mechanic for the Pacific Railroad. Read this interesting article about Mike: press here
Once we hear that Mike Brodie has taken up photography again, he will be straight on the
500photographers main list. http://500photographers.blogspot.com/2010/06/special-001-mike-brodie.html

By William Inman
Mike Brodie left home at 18 for a new life on America’s grid of railways and began to photograph the people he encounters on the tracks and in the
A portrait of the Polaroid Kid, photo by
William Inman squats – those who, for whatever their reasons, embrace the travel culture.
Now 21, he arms himself with little more than his Nikon F3 camera and spends his time traveling the United States telling his own story and those of the ruddy faces he encounters aboard freight, in abandoned warehouses, in homemade shacks and the landscapes in between.
His photographs have been exhibited in galleries in Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and his current exhibition,
Homesteadaz
, is on display at Get This Gallery in
Atlanta. His work was also selected to appear in the 2006 edition of the Paris
International Photo Fair at the Louvre.
Known as the Polaroid Kid for his work with time-zero film, which Polaroid discontinued early last year, Brodie tells us he now shoots strictly with 35 mm and his work is evolving to include more candid photography. He also

discusses his motivation, his traveling lifestyle and talks about his father, who is serving nine years in an Arizona penitentiary.
Dry Ink:
So, you’re the Polaroid Kid, do you still use Polaroid?
Mike Brodie:
Nope, they discontinued the SX-70 film, the time-zero film…the film I used. It’s what I think is the best film ever. So I was like, shit, I’ve got to learn how to use a 35 mm. So yea, I don’t use Polaroid.
DI:
Well, what kind of camera are you shooting with these days?
MB:
Nikon F3, from 1980, it works good though. It’s kind of a classic.
DI:
When did you start traveling, taking pictures and finally getting attention from art galleries?
MB:
It’s really all thanks to the internet. If I didn’t have a Web site and the ability to send people my photos; it, of course, would be a longer process and I probably wouldn’t be (showing in galleries). But, as far as simply taking photos, I got into it about four years ago when I found a crappy
Polaroid (camera) in the back of my friend’s car, and she said I could have it so I went and bought a pack of film and shot a picture of the handlebars of my BMX bike – I used to ride BMX for six years – and it came out with the craziest colors. I was hooked… I started shooting Polaroid. Simultaneously, I met Savannah, my girlfriend, and we both had freight trains rolling by our house. And she’s the wild punk girl I was fascinated with and we wanted to hop trains, but she was still in school, so I said ‘Fuck this, man, I want to ride trains!’ So I quit my job and waited around for a while and she still wasn’t ready so I hopped a train to Jacksonville from Pensacola. I didn’t

know what I was doing, and ever since then it’s been a learning process, learning how to ride trains correctly, and what I photographed has evolved. And then having a
Oakland to the L.A. River, by Mike Brodie
Web site that anyone in the world can look at, and all types of people contact me so…
DI:
Do people that you travel with resent you for taking their photo?
Or what’s their response?
MB:
Everyone I photograph, I’m on good terms with. Sometimes, when they see the photo, they’ll put their two cents in, but, I don’t know, I think a lot of people – I’ve had a couple shows recently – and it’s like… there’s a bunch of dirty kids in a gallery and (art patrons) think it’s fucked up. I don’t know what they’re talking about, and I don’t want to have a conversation with those people. But, everyone I photograph… they’re down with it. They know what I do with the photo. I mean, some of them I’ll never see again, but most of them I keep in touch with.
DI:
You seem like you’ve done a good job reconciling the art and the traveling culture, is that difficult? I mean, not necessarily keeping your travelin’ ‘cred, but… you’ve had a show in Beverly Hills?
MB:
Um, I don’t know, it’s funny, I hopped trains to the show in Beverly
Hills. Me and four of my friends rode down to L.A. from Oakland, and we all got real wasted at the opening. People think train riding is some sort of sacred culture, and it definitely has deep roots in history, but it's 2007 and people nowadays who ride trains do it for fun. Some want to act like their

like, down and out, like impoverished young kids being exploited or something and that’s silly. I ride trains for fun. I just like photographing these people because they interest me and they’re beautiful and they’re important to me. And I want to keep the document open on traveling because I need something to keep me going. I mean, if I wasn’t taking photos, I wouldn’t be traveling. 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.
DI:
So is there like a network of traveling kids? Do they all know each other?
MB:
Half the people in my photographs know each other, and they all are in a similar age range and they’re all traveling and hanging out in the same areas, most of them, same groups.
So if they don’t already know one another, they will down the road. Or they’re MySpace friends. All those traveling kids all are on MySpace, all have cell phones and all keep in touch with one another (laughs).
DI:
Ha! That’s hilarious, an interesting juxtaposition.
Soup//Paradise City, U.S.A, by Mike Brodie
MB:
Yea, that’s why it needs to be made fun of and not taken seriously. I don’t mean to make people look so down and out in my photographs, but I think that comes with portrait photos, you know, I’ll say ‘Look right here!’
And they don’t smile. So I think that gives an undertone of sadness.

DI:
So how many shows have you had?
MB:
This is my third. Milwaukee, Los Angeles and Atlanta.
DI:
Why do you call this one
Homesteadaz
?
MB:
I named this one after some kids who used to squat this abandoned apartment complex in Philly. A couple of ‘em are in these photos.
DI:
Home base is Pensacola?
MB:
Yea, it’s been my home base for about six years.
DI:
So do you just pick up and go whenever?
MB:
Yea, pretty much. I usually have a solid plan of where I want to go, but different things – different adventures - will sprout from it. And whatever pictures come along during the way…
DI:
So are you going to continue doing portraits?
MB:
No, I don’t like doing portraits actually. I’m evolving more into shooting candidly. I really like just shooting stuff, being there, like when no one’s really paying attention. (Portraits) can make good photos, but I like the weird stuff that happens when no one seems to be looking.
DI:
So what’s next?
MB:
Well, I hope I stick to it for a while, I don’t know how long, my project is really just scratching the surface. I have a lot more photos to take and I’m

going to keep riding trains. I know I’m going to keep shooting till 2012; my dad gets out of jail around 2011. And he’s going to ride a train with me, but he’ll probably have to sit around in Arizona on parole or something. So hopefully I’ll stay motivated to shoot photos until then and wrap up the project when we go for a ride.
DI:
So, if you don’t mind me asking, what’s he in jail for?
MB:
Being stupid (laughs). Stealing stuff, he’s been in jail his whole life. He went to this construction site, this subdivision, he stole like $25,000 worth of marble tile. This guy actually hired him to do it, and he got caught and got nine years.
DI:
Do you talk to him?
MB:
No not really, I have a hard time… I’ve visited him the last two years in a row and I’m visiting him again this year, but I have a hard time writing him. I just would rather see him in person. I could write him and tell him everything that going on with my life, but I just send him a few notes here and there and tell him I’m looking forward to seeing him, and (when I see him) I’ll run my mouth for a few hours, whatever.

By Jay DeFoore
September 2006
M+B Bound by Tones of Dirt and Bone by Mike Brodie Sept 16 - Oct 21 The debut exhibition of 21-year-old photographer Mike Brodie. Recently a major cover feature in
Look Look magazine, the Pensacola, Florida native has documented his friends and companions while traveling along the American railways for the last three years. In true
Kerouac fashion, his own "On the Road" serves as a photo narrative of those he meets and stays with along the way. Opening Reception: Sept 16, 7-9 pm