Michael Brodie’s Failing records ten years of life in motion across the United States. Its world is inhabited by hitchhikers, itinerant companions, and people living at society’s margins, but Brodie does not approach them as a visiting observer. The photographs arise from shared roads, vehicles, rooms, and landscapes, giving the book the character of a personal diary as much as a social document.
The decade traced here is marked by intimacy and its consequences: love, separation, addiction, bereavement, and death. Brodie remains close to the disorder of these experiences without reducing his subjects to illustrations of hardship. Open country and receding horizons appear alongside encounters in confined or transient spaces. Moments of beauty do not resolve the darkness; instead, they register as brief, fragile interruptions within it.
Failing also extends—and complicates—the account of American itinerancy established in Brodie’s earlier books. A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, published in 2013, pictured rail riders and drifters pursuing freedom and adventure, while Tones of Dirt and Bone, published in 2015, gathered earlier SX-70 work from the period when photography first accompanied his freight-hopping life. In contrast, Failing looks back from a more chastened position. Youthful escape has become an adult reckoning with attachment, damage, responsibility, and survival. The title is therefore less a verdict than a framework for considering what remains after ideals have collided with lived experience.
Published by Twin Palms Publishers, the 412-page volume gives this long record an appropriately sustained form. Its importance for a photobook collection rests on the continuity between biography and photographic practice: Brodie’s changing relation to the road alters both the emotional register and the historical meaning of his subject. Read beside his previous monographs, Failing forms a consequential later chapter; considered alone, it is an extended, internally witnessed account of precarious American lives and the communities that hold them together.
