Photo: Brontez. San Francisco, California. ©Mike Brodie, courtesy of Twin Palms Publishers
In the afterword of Tones of Dirt and Blood (Twin Palms), photographer Mike Brodie describes a moment so completely, it is easy to forget these are only words: “My first memory was when I was one year old. Imagine that? Lying by a river bed. Arizona is hot in the summer, and even worse when you have an earache. No pants on, screaming and crying like it would help or something, my face bright RED. The blanket I was lying on made of prickly pear green wool. If that cloth was still around it would tell you a story. But it’s long gone, underground somewhere, tired.”
Brodie’s words beautifully conjure an image in the mind’s eye that looks just like his photographs: coarse, vulnerable, and exposed to the elements, full of raw emotion and pure energy. The colors are both sharp and dull, the light bright, the dark murky, evoking a feeling of the undertow. The photographs in Tones of Dirt and Blood were made between 2004 and 2006 while Brodie traveled throughout the United States. They were taken with a Polaroid camera and Time Zero film, using a distinct color palette that evokes memories of late twentieth-century America in all its analog glory.
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