Failing

Failing – If Michael Brodie’s first monograph was a cinematic dream, Failing is the awakening and the reckoning, a raw, wounded, and searingly honest photographic diary of a decade marked by love and heartbreak, loss and grief — biblical in its scope, and in its search for truth and meaning. Here is the flip side of the American dream, seen from within; here is bearing close witness to the brutal chaos of addiction and death; here are front-seat encounters with hitchhikers and kindred wanderers on society’s edges, sustained by the ragtag community of the road. Failing often exists in darkness but is tuned to grace. Brodie’s eye stays forever open to the strange and fleeting beauty that exists in forgotten places — the open country and the lost horizons that sweep past dust-spattered windows in a spectral blur. “Looking back, it’s as if it never really happened. I was never a photographer holding a camera but a vessel to tell a story. It’s like it all existed within a dream, and this is just God’s plan for my life.”In Nashville he became a diesel mechanic. And when that life exploded, the open road called again. Moved across the country again. Got married. Bought land on the long dusty Winnemucca road Johnny Cash sang about. Started his own business. Built a house. Put down roots And when that life exploded, the open road called again. Throughout almost all of it, his cameras were with him, and at last those pictures are coming to light