SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Casemore Gallery is presenting New And Selected Works, a solo exhibition of work by photographer Mike Brodie covering his itinerant younger years hitchhiking and hopping trains across America, a period that produced his critically acclaimed 2004-2008 series A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, and a decade of harrowing adult trials that began in 2012, resulting in his recent series Failing.

The photographs from both bodies of work are notable for being intimate and cinematic in equal measure. Becoming, by default and intent, part of the communities he encountered, he made photographs that eliminate distance between himself and his subjects, a closeness passed on to the viewer, and heightened by the warm, earthy tones of his uncompromising images.

Brodie’s photographs from A Period of Juvenile Prosperity depict young people living largely untethered lives. As he hopped trains, camped, and squatted his way across the US, Brodie captured images of a defiant risk taking associated with a particular sense of youthful abandon. In one, young legs dangle precariously close to the ground below (“riding suicide”). In another, a dirty middle finger is flipped by a snarling punk hanging from the very back of a train as the ground rushes beneath him. In other images, a more tender side of these travelers emerges. Hoisting their upper bodies above open-top hoppers to contemplate the vastness and serenity of the passing American landscape. Young bodies affectionately nestled together as they sleep on abandoned apartment floors or beds of coal, comforted by each other in discomforting settings, surrounded by their belongings, from worn-out boots to a chunky accordion. What ultimately emerges is a vision where freedom is more powerful than comfort, and a chosen family grows with each passing stop.

The works from Brodie’s series Failing pick up a few years later and span a brutal decade in his life, with the passage of time introducing harsh realities. Love is torn by loss; death is heavily present and as real as life itself. Many of the faces are older and scarred; objects and animals freighted with meaning are centered into a bleaker but still beautifully rendered narrative. Rotted wooden planks ablaze in an abandoned Dodge truck bed. A butterfly resting on a paint-flecked window sill. Two newborn lambs cuddling in a barn. A row of 12 smaller works includes images of oranges scattered around an ominously titled book on a truck seat, a bloody heart atop a piece of cardboard, a statue of a resting angel viewed through vertical iron gates, and a painting of flaming roses hung on a battered wall. Together, these photographs, larger and smaller, of the real and the symbolic, tell a story of freedom tempered, of love lost to death, and of perseverance through broken expectations, unflinching in its truth and anchored in Brodie’s unshakeable optimism.

Of the photographs that became Failing, Brodie has said, “I was living more of my adult life with responsibilities and work and marriage and always having my camera with me… I wasn't trying to document people, or a group of people that I was just obsessed with. It was just me consistently having a camera and photographing moments in my personal life and otherwise.”

Rounding out the exhibition are a selection of personal objects of Brodie’s that provide additional weight and insight into his life, travels, and the people he has met.

Michael Brodie was born in Mesa, Arizona in 1985. A self-taught photographer, he began taking pictures in 2003 after discovering a Polaroid camera in the backseat of a car, during the final years of Polaroid’s Time-Zero film. These photographs would later be published in Brodie’s 2014 monograph Tones of Dirt and Bone. He switched to a 35mm camera around 2005 and continued photographing the transient people and communities he encountered hopping trains across the US. These photographs were first published in his 2013 monograph A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, to much critical acclaim. His most recent monograph, Failing, documenting a decade of traveling the US beginning in 2010, was published in 2025. Brodie’s photographs are held in collections worldwide, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Martin Parr Foundation, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and the Sir Elton John Photography Collection. He lives with his wife and son in Pensacola, Florida.