Railroads to freedom: The drifters living and dreaming on America's freight trains

Sat Mar 9 17:16:30 GMT 2013

Railroads to freedom: The drifters living and 
dreaming on America's freight trains
Running from poverty or chasing their dreams, 
these drifters find a kind of freedom on 
America's freight trains  and Mike Brodie has 
gone along for the ride, creating these haunting photographs.
Charlie Cooper
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/railroads-to-freedom-the-drifters-living-and-dreaming-on-americas-freight-trains-8523098.html
Friday 08 March 2013
Nothing cuts to the heart of America like the 
railroads. Anyone with even a passing familiarity 
with country, blues or even Bob Dylan will know 
how trains rattle through American folk music, 
evoking the great open spaces of the continent  
and the individuals that get lost in them.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, tens of 
thousands of economic migrants were to be found 
bedding down each night in the boxcars of freight 
trains that swallowed up the immense distances 
between states. A great many of them didn't even 
have anywhere to go. Thanks to troubadours like 
Woody Guthrie, the legend of the hobo was born: 
the American wanderer spirit, a modernist 
descendant of the rail-building pioneer of generations before.

Emacs!

click link for picture gallery
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/railroads-to-freedom-the-drifters-living-and-dreaming-on-americas-freight-trains-8523098.html?action=gallery

Nearly a century down the line, thousands are 
still riding the rails, mostly young men and 
women, some running away from poverty in a 
country that still struggles to provide for its 
poor, others just looking for an adventure and the romance of the railroad.
One of them, Arizona-born Mike Brodie, decided to 
take some pictures along the way. Leaving his 
home in Pensacola, Florida at 17, he spent the 
best part of ten years jumping freight trains, 
hitchhiking and finding work and sustenance where 
he could. Using an old Polaroid camera that had 
been sitting redundant on the back seat of a 
friend's car, he began taking pictures in 2004  and found it hard to stop.
The photographs he took in the ensuing years are 
a rare document of an American subculture  and a 
curious portrait of the country's youth. 
Collected together into a new book, A Period of 
Juvenile Prosperity, the pictures centre on the 
people Brodie met along the way.
"I never knew what these photos were going to 
turn into, what they were going to represent," he 
says. "It was intuitive  photographing things 
near to me, things attractive to me, things that 
seemed important at the time, but I always knew I 
wanted to photograph the train hoppers."
Though conscious of the cultural archetypes in 
whose tracks he was following, Brodie says the 
"lure" of the railroads was instinctive. So too 
was his affinity with the camera. "I learned it 
somehow  training myself and seeing other things 
quite randomly I wanted to copy," he says. "The 
first pictures I liked were the photos in the BMX 
and skateboarding magazines I read as a kid. I 
came across books; one was Stevef McCurry's 
portraits for National Geographic. Most of my first pictures sucked, though."
His natural eye for composition and instinct for 
the foibles of Polaroid photography quickly began 
to attract the attention of established 
photographers and galleries. But even when his 
pictures began appearing in exhibitions, Brodie 
kept on riding the rails. He changed from a 
Polaroid to a 35mm Nikon F3, but his subjects 
remained the same  the train hoppers.
Brodie himself insists that he wasn't running 
away from anything  and nor were many of his 
fellow travellers. "I can't speak for everyone 
but the majority just wanted a taste of that free 
lifestyle, that American adventure. They wanted 
to leave town, ride the trains, see the country 
and figure out what they wanted to do with their 
life. As for myself, I was naturally drawn to go and
 check some things out."
One of the most striking images shows a slim 
young man doing a very good impression of Johnny 
Cash's iconic middle finger  while hanging off the back of a speeding train.
"He goes by the name of Soup," Brodie recalls. 
"From Montgomery, Alabama. A movie could be made 
out of his life. He left home and went on the 
street at a young age. He was running away from 
something. Everyone else was doing it by choice. He was different."
Brodie has become something of an unlikely 
favourite of America's photographic 
establishment, who were astonished by the 
technical accomplishment of this unknown, 
self-taught drifter. He won the Baum Award for 
Emerging American Photographers in 2007 and has 
been featured in exhibitions all over the USA.
Despite the adulation, Brodie, 27, now works as a 
truck mechanic in Oakland, California. He says he 
will take photographs again "once I've made a 
life for myself". He says he does think about 
riding the railroads again  and he still sleeps in a sleeping bag every night.

'A Period of Prosperity' by Mike Brodie is 
published by Twin Palms at $65. An exhibition of 
Brodie's work is at the Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, until 6 April 
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