Twin Palms Publishers – serie

diCorcia’s curation of “disparate photographs,” from his early career to his first solo shows"The disparate photographs assembled here were made over the course of twenty years. None of them were originally intended to be used in this book. By ordering and shaping them I tried to investigate the possibilities of narrative both within a single image and especially in relation to the other photographs. A Storybook Life< is an attempt to discover the possibilities of meaning in the interaction of seemingly unrelated images in the hope that content can constantly mutate according to both the external and internal condition of the viewer, but remain meaningful because of its inherent, but latent content. The conscious and subconscious decisions made in editing the photographs are the real work of A Storybook Life." —Philip-Lorca diCorcia (born 1953)

"A family album preserves only carefully selected photographs. Out of an entire life, it stores only handpicked moments, privileging special occasions, displaying only happy moments. It tends to underline a group’s social links, to highlight a shared life. None of this figures in She: instead of a chronology, time is stopped. There is no group photo or desire to stage a collective destiny, only isolated models and individuals who do not seem to communicate amongst themselves; no happy moments or picturesque places, only indifferent moments in ordinary places. The models pose, but reservedly, often without looking into the camera. And even when we do see their faces, we don’t really seem to see them. When we close the book and think a bit about it, we cannot but see She as the anti-family album par excellence." —Quentin Bajac, Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art

Brodie’s decade-long record of his transient American life, brimming with poignant stories of those he encountered along the wayMike Brodie’s first monograph, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, touched down more than decade ago, depicting his fellow rail-riders and drifters in a rebellious and wildfire pursuit of adventure and freedom. “Brodie leapt into the life of picture-making as if he was the first to do it,” Danny Lyon wrote about the book in Aperture. Next came Tones of Dirt and Bone, a collection of earlier SX-70 pictures Brodie made when photography first led him to hopping freights, when he was known as “The Polaroid Kidd.” And then Brodie seemed to disappear from the art world as suddenly and mysteriously as he’d first appeared. Maybe his vanishing was another myth. Maybe it was just a necessary retreat. “I was divorcing myself from all that,” he says. “I was growing up. I was pursuing this other life.”If A Period of Juvenile Prosperity 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. 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.Michael Brodie (born 1985) is the author of A Period of Juvenile Prosperity (2013) and Tones of Dirt and Bone (2015). He lives with his girlfriend in Biloxi, Mississippi, where the railroad is never far, just hidden in the trees from view. Unseen, it rattles the windows and floors of their apartment every time a train passes through.