“I’m fascinated by death and I’m fascinated by reality and not just for shock’s sake. It’s just part of our life. To this day it still haunts me and I always wish I just would have run back and photographed the body. I know it’s morbid but it’s life” – Mike Brodie
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via Time: https://time.com/section/lightbox/
Mike Brodie is easy to mythologize. A teenager-turned-supertramp (a term usually used to describe youth eager to travel by whatever means and for as little money as possible) Brodie became a darling of the photography world after carting an old Polaroid SX-70 and some stale bagels on his first train-hopping experience across the United States.
From March 7th to April 17th Fundacion Municipal de Valladolid is presenting “Train and Freedom” by Mike Brodie in the venue of Sala San Benito. Mike Brodie is a phenomenon , a natural talented teenager, who got immediately famous through social media and was later celebrated by the art critics thanks to the two magnificent books published when he stopped taking pictures. He lived as an outsider hoping trains crossing United States.
The next time I heard anything about Mike Brodie, aka The Polaroid Kidd, was when I learned his photographs of his freight train-hopping peers were hanging in the Louvre as part of the Paris International Photo Fair in 2006.
Mike Brodie’s images—of trains with the earth flying by, of a tender sleeping embrace—are touching and terrifying, exciting and raw.
via The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2013/01/slide-show-pictures-from-mike-brodies-a-period-of-juvenile-prosperity.html#slide_ss_0=1
Mike Brodie says that he never really wanted to be an artist. But he’s travelled over fifty thousand miles by train, lived with an underground rock band in Philadelphia and with vegans in Portland, and photographed it all. His images—of trains with the earth flying by, of a tender sleeping embrace—are touching and terrifying, exciting and raw
From Feature Shoot:
Mike Brodie is a self-trained photographer from Pensacola, Florida, better known by the alter-ego, The Polaroid Kidd. At the age of eighteen, Brodie traveled the railroads of America, pending three years photographing the people he encountered along the way with his trusty Polaroid SX-70.
