Mike Brodie – Failing – AMERICAN SUBURB X

When I received a copy of Michael Brodie’s new book Failing, I knew it would take me a while to organize my feelings towards it. Some thoughts take time to settle from a place of instinctive fondness and sentimentality, especially when you feel so strongly connected to someone’s previous work. As for many of us, my first contact with Mike’s photographs was through his monograph A Period of Juvenile Prosperity. The book was published over a decade ago (2012) by Twin Palms. Brodie’s images of train hopping across America captured his companions through intimate portraits set against cinematic frames of ever-changing landscapes. The series merited attention with the best of the genre and since then has become part of the visual memory of many of us. It is photography in its purest form.

In the foreword to APOJP Mike wrote “I don’t want to be famous, but I hope this book is remembered forever.” This sentence explains so much about Mike, also with regards to his new book. Trying too hard, particularly in this genre, is a mood killer. Danny Lyon was right when he said about Brodie that he leapt into the life of picture-making as if he was the first to do it. Mike’s way of compulsively capturing moments without concern for how the images might endure beyond his own experience is a gift. Back then I bought the slipcase-edition of APOJP which was released one year later by Paul Schiek’s TBW Books. I mention this, because Paul Schiek is a long-standing collaborator of Mike and was also heavily involved in the editing of Failing. It was him who referred Brodie to Twin Palms back in the day. The decision not to publish the book with his own publishing house is, in my opinion, such a well-considered and unselfish gesture, which is rare to find.

Mike’s gritty photographs became a success; gallery exhibitions, the book Tones of Dirt and Bone (2015), numerous articles and songs of praise followed. Then, it became quiet. Brodie activated and deactivated various Instagram accounts and as suddenly as he had appeared, he vanished. To abandon the art world to later rejoin it, is a bold move. Maybe part of the myth. Also, I think we take ourselves too seriously if we think that leaving the photography world is to be equated with leaving the medium. I always hoped he would be out there taking pictures again, which of course does not mean he necessarily shares his life again with us. Now Failing has been published, once more by Jack Woody’s Twin Palms Publishers, and its intro reads like a comeback which was never meant to be one. Stories are happening to the people who share them.

In Nashville he became a diesel mechanic. Fell in love. Moved across the country again. Got married. Bought land on the long dusty Winnemucca road Johnny Cash sang about. Started his own business. Built a house. Put down roots. And when that life exploded, the open road called again…. 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. Biblical in its scope, and in its search for truth and meaning.” (Rebecca Bengal, Twin Palms)

The book’s selection sticks to Brodie’s 35mm color work. It’s smartly edited with an easy hand which lets the photographs speak for themselves. Most of the 193 images are surrounded by generous white space with a few photographs printed to fill a double-page. Vertical formats are the rare exception, and once again I realize how Mike Brodie’s work is per se cinematic in its nature. The horizontal format just naturally emerges from his preference for epic landscapes, open roads and wide horizons, in Failing often seen through a dusty car window, sometimes blurry and in motion. The settings have their own story and form the backdrop for what initially feels like a road trip when you open the book and scroll through the first pages.

Failing is broken up in three chapters simply titled The Beginning, The Middle and The End. I cannot explain how it is put together, but I believe it is deeply personal. We encounter life taking its course and, in the end, pieces of it falling apart. The autobiographical structure therefore allows only a chronological order I guess, because once something is fractured, it is difficult to mend it back together. Descriptive titles were added next to the photographs. They are constructed, part of the symbiotic push and pull between image and text. More detailed in the beginning, they point to a bright and positive future which seems to wait for Brodie. There is birth happening (Two Lambs), a rainbow appears behind a jumping man (My friend, Tim), a woman smiles gently through a car window (My Wife Celeste). Then sequences with joyful images bearing light-hearted titles like Seven Ripe Tomatoes, Feeding a pig a donut, Building our Home follow. Even the moth in one of the earlier pictures looks like a butterfly. All this beauty and then it went from really good to really bad. Not from one day to the next, but in a seemingly unstoppable downwards spiral.

The titles become sparser until they disappear completely in some places. We become witness of chaos, addiction, darkness, dirt and death. While we encounter more and more nameless people and even unnamed deaths (Dead roommate, Dead daughter, Three dead coyotes, Dead dog), short and harsh words hint at poignant stories of those Mike Brodie met along the way or even shared a life with. Imagery and wording are bleak. A dog is buried, Mike’s hand gets dirtier, his fridge emptier (My refrigerator after the divorce), the places darker. It is not easy to watch, because the extent of destruction is omnipresent in the second half of the book. It can no longer be denied, and we do need these calm, sometimes gloomy, landscape images in between to breathe a sigh of relief while we follow the story of Mike’s transient life. A photograph showing a marble statue with the title Angel follows one next to which Addict is written. Two words, so contrary and yet not. The knowledge of Mia Justice Smith’s death makes it impossible not to think of her, as she was still sleeping peacefully on one of my favourite images a few pages earlier. It ended so sad, but I loved where it began.

Art historians like me are sometimes tempted to categorize oeuvres and name parallels and differences, so I can’t help but make a short comparison to A Period of Juvenile Prosperities. The earlier photographs from APOJP join the ranks of the great classic American road photographs. They are not documentary in the strictest sense, but essentially designed as such. Cinematic and iconic. The images in Failing carry a different sentiment. They are for sure even more personal, raw and constructed more simply in a way. Some of them even have the feel of found images, because at first sight they look so arbitrary and random. They could tell us about comparable fates, beyond Mike’s personal experience. And yet they burn themselves into my memory, not so much because of their visual language, but much more because of the feeling they leave in me. Stained objects, abandoned places, empty rooms and faces, an environment into which drugs have moved in and joy has moved out. Leafing through Failing is hard to bear at times and yet in small moments hope flashes up. Two of the last double-page spreads show alluring road photographs and the beauty lights up again. In one of the images the sun is rising, and the light is coming through the darkness. In the other one a railroad track runs parallel to us through the picture, leading to an unnamed future.

It seems that Mike Brodie leans on his art when other aspects of his life are failing. Flipping through the pages, I first felt the urge to look for answers, only to realize it wouldn’t change the connection I would have with the book. Yes, we are left with mysteries and questions about the hidden stories and abysses. Still even at their most personal moments, Mike’s photographs let us uncover our own feelings of failure, darkness and sorrow. I think there lies the strength of the book and this is something we can’t appreciate enough. ”The love we feel — when we feel another’s pain — NEVER DIES”, Mike wrote and I have nothing to add to that. Highest Recommendation!