Before A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, there were the days of the Polaroid Kidd. In the early 2000s, Mike Brodie first found his way into photography via the SX-70 camera. It was the last gasp of the golden era of Time-Zero, and the film was Brodie’s gateway. It was expensive, ten sheets to a roll, but he appreciated its inherent limitations; its idiosyncrasies, the way it brought out the tones of the railroad. He liked the way you could manipulate the surface of the film, the feel of the Polaroid, the smell of the toxic emulsion. Sometimes, it seemed like a living, breathing thing. Brodie wasn’t alone: Walker Evans, Andy Warhol, Ansel Adams, and Helmut Newton all praised the SX-70. Like Warhol, Brodie gravitated to the model mostly for portraits. In Brodie’s case, the pictures he made of people he met while riding freights, from Pensacola, Florida to New Orleans, to Washington, and along the way.
