Mike Brodie. En train de marchandises à travers l'Amérique

The story that led to A Period of Juvenile Prosperity is far more interesting than the simplified idea of “a photographer who decided to travel across the United States by train.” Mike Brodie did not begin the journey as a photographic project. First came the need to move, to disappear from conventional life; photography arrived later, almost by accident. That distinction explains much of the book’s power.

There is some confusion regarding the exact date of his first journey, but Brodie’s own biographical account and information from Twin Palms place the beginning when he was around seventeen years old, in Pensacola, Florida. His original plan was fairly modest: he wanted to reach Mobile, Alabama, to visit a friend. He knew virtually nothing about illegally riding freight trains. He approached the tracks with a backpack and very little food, hopped onto a freight train and discovered too late that it was travelling in exactly the opposite direction. Instead of taking him west toward Mobile, it carried him across Florida toward Jacksonville. A few days later, he managed to return, again by train. That absurd journey, which ended almost exactly where it had begun, became the catalyst for everything that followed.

From then on, he began travelling across the United States using essentially any means that required no money: freight trains, hitchhiking and long stretches on foot. He followed no tourist itinerary and had no intention of completing any predetermined route. The railway network itself dictated his movements. During those years, he crossed 46 states and is estimated to have travelled around 80,000 kilometres aboard more than 170 freight trains.

It is important, however, to distinguish between two periods, as they are fundamental to understanding his work.

The first roughly covers the years 2004 to 2006. Shortly after he began travelling, Brodie found a Polaroid camera abandoned behind the seat of a car. He had no formal photographic training and apparently no great artistic ambitions either. He simply began photographing what he was experiencing, creating a kind of visual diary. These Polaroid images would eventually form another body of work, initially associated with Tones of Dirt and Bone and later revisited in Polaroid Kid.

Brodie also began uploading his photographs to the Internet and adopted the pseudonym “The Polaroid Kidd,” which he even wrote on freight cars and walls during his travels. His photography therefore began circulating online long before Twin Palms published A Period of Juvenile Prosperity.

When he could no longer obtain the Polaroid film he had been using, he changed formats. He began working with a Nikon F3 35 mm camera and colour film. This marks the true beginning of the body of images that would eventually become A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, produced approximately between 2006 and 2009.

And this is probably the most important aspect of the project: Brodie was part of the story he was telling. He was one of them, and the colourful train hoppers in his photographs were his friends and travelling companions.

They rode the same trains, slept in the same places, got dirty in the same way, went hungry, waited for hours beside the tracks and shared the same uncertainties of life on the road.

Brodie himself has explained that he knew virtually everyone who appears in his photographs. Several of the women in the book had been his girlfriends, while some of the men were his closest friends.

This completely changes the nature of the images.

We are not looking at the work of a documentary photographer who discovers a community of train hoppers and obtains permission to photograph them. The camera is inside the experience. Many of the photographs possess that extraordinary intimacy precisely because the people do not appear to be observed by an outsider. Brodie belongs to the group.

The community depicted in the book consisted mainly of young people living itinerant lives: train hoppers, punks, drifters, squatters, fugitives and people who had simply decided to step away temporarily from conventional life. Some travelled for a period before eventually returning; others had turned constant movement into their way of life.

And travelling this way had very little to do with a romantic vision of the railroad.

There were long periods of waiting beside the tracks, nights sleeping outdoors, constant dirt, worn-out clothes, injuries, cold, heat, hunger and complete uncertainty about where they might end up the following day. Freight trains were never designed for passengers, and riding them clandestinely was both dangerous and illegal.

This is precisely why A Period of Juvenile Prosperity works so well: Brodie does not conceal this harshness, but neither does he turn his companions into victims.

His photographs show dirty bodies, battered feet, grease-covered clothes, freight cars, tattoos, injuries and abandoned places. Yet alongside all of this we find friendship, love, sex, youth, boredom, humour, tenderness and an extraordinarily intense sense of freedom.

The journey was also a way of experiencing the United States through a completely different geography.

Brodie did not cross the country by following highways, airports, hotels or city centres. His map was the railway infrastructure itself: classification yards, secondary tracks, bridges, industrial areas, outskirts, vacant lots and the vast spaces separating one city from another. The United States appears in his photographs through its logistical infrastructure, almost as though we were looking at the reverse side of the American landscape.

For this reason, there is inevitably a connection with the American road-trip tradition, even if the mechanism is entirely different.

Robert Frank travelled across the United States by car for The Americans. Stephen Shore followed highways, photographing motels and diners. Brodie literally moves inside the industrial machinery that crosses the country.

But he probably was not thinking very much about this photographic lineage while making the pictures. He was self-taught, and photography emerged as a natural consequence of travelling. In an interview, he explained that he had an enormous curiosity about the world and that travelling eventually became almost addictive. Photography simply developed alongside it.

Another fascinating aspect is the sheer number of photographs he made. Some sources connected with later exhibitions refer to approximately 7,000 images produced during those years. The archive is therefore vastly larger than the roughly sixty photographs ultimately selected for the book.

By around 2009, that period of his life had come to an end.

And this is where Brodie’s story becomes even more unusual. Instead of immediately taking advantage of the recognition he was beginning to receive and building an artistic career, he virtually abandoned both photography and train hopping. He trained as a diesel mechanic and spent several years repairing vehicles. By the time A Period of Juvenile Prosperity finally appeared as a book, the life it portrayed essentially belonged to his past.

Twin Palms finally published A Period of Juvenile Prosperity in 2013. It is a large-format volume of 104 pages containing 60 colour reproductions. The book was immediately recognised as one of the most important Photobooks of that year and became a finalist for the Paris Photo–Aperture First PhotoBook Award.

And the title is perfect.

“A Period of Juvenile Prosperity” suggests a period of youthful abundance, but this prosperity has nothing to do with money. In fact, almost none of the protagonists owns very much at all.

The wealth evoked by the title lies elsewhere: youth, time, friendship, mobility, desire, bodies, falling in love and the feeling that it is still possible to abandon one life and begin another simply by hopping onto a train.

That is the key to understanding the book. It is not really about trains.

Nor is it simply a document about American train hoppers.

It is the visual diary of a few years during which Brodie and his friends could live with the impression that time was almost infinite. Looking at the book years later, we know that all of this would inevitably come to an end. They grow older, relationships end, friends take different paths and Brodie eventually leaves the trains behind.

That retrospective awareness transforms the photographs into something far more complex than images of adventure.

They are photographs made from within a youth that does not yet realise it is disappearing.

And that is probably why A Period of Juvenile Prosperity has aged so well as a photobook. Brodie documented a very specific American subculture, but ultimately created something far more universal: a book about that brief interval between adolescence and adulthood when it still seems possible to live without offering too many explanations, to move without a destination, and to believe that there will always be another train to hop.