A Period of Juvenile Prosperity: Photographs of David Brodie

I often see homeless young people in downtown Manhattan (especially in the East Village) with their dark clothes, filthy hair, and pissed off looks. They contrast sharply to the carefully dressed and more affluent young people in the neighborhood, and thanks to economics, they don’t get much benefit from being there. They can’t afford to enjoy the bars or restaurants, can’t afford to take the subway to the museums, so I have to wonder why they come here. In a piece I did for City Limits, a homeless girl sums it up like this; you can hitchhike into New York City, but you can’t hitchhike out. She refers to these kids as “crusties,” whose chief interest is usually drugs and beer.

A Period of Juvenile Prosperity is a book of photos taken by Mike Brodie, over a period of three where he rode freight trains. Almost all of the people in the photos are young, very few older ones. Some of them look perfectly happy, relaxing on the timber floors of the train cars, sometimes sitting precariously above the wheels, staring off into the cornfields and swamps. There seems to be an unknown world of young people hopping freight trains around the USA, which is how Brodie describes most of his life. It seems like these kids are becoming a new kind of nomad.

Mike Brodie describes himself as a kid from a broken home, though not necessarily a bad one. His father was in jail a lot, and his mother wasn’t the most responsible of parents, but it wasn’t rife with constant beatings. They moved from Mesa, Arizona, to Florida, where he was introduced to punk music. Born in 1985, he would’ve missed the early punk rock scene, and by the time he started taking photos with a cast off Polaroid, the company was already discontinuing regular film. If he came in during the days of regular film, he might not have been able to afford to take the photos.

One of the running themes of this book appears to be hygiene, or lack of it. There’s a photo in this book, of a teenage girl lying on her back on the floor of a hopper car, legs wide apart, skirt pulled up, proudly displaying her menstrual-stained white panties. If not for the stain, her underwear would be the only part of her that’s not encrusted with dirt. Most of the young people in the photos are filthy, which I’d expect from people who spend all year travelling as hobos. Some of the photos show them washing their clothes, like the one of the clay-crusted turning the bathwater brown! Others show them with bandages on their legs, which makes me wonder how many of them may be on heroin?

I also noticed that almost all of the freight train riders are white. Only one black man can be seen, getting handcuffed by police. I have to wonder if this tells us something about race and families in the USA? Brodie says his life was troubled by a broken home, and he says he lived in Philadelphia for a while, but he doesn’t talk about gangs or violence. He was part of the punk subculture, but would this have been the case if he were black? If he and his mother had moved to Florida, would he have found BMX biking and punk rock, or would he have joined a gang? Brodie Oregon, lived with vegans, moved to Philadelphia, lived with an underground rock band, but didn’t get into drug dealing or pimping. Does this mean that aimless black and white youths have different ways of being hopeless and directionless?

There have been articles about the “crust punks” in the New York Times, and the attitude towards them and their lifestyle hasn’t been especially favorable. The people who work low-wage jobs resent them being here, and most stores won’t hire anyone without a permanent address. There is, however, what I believe is the reason a lot of them come to New York City, and I came to that conclusion from the book’s photos. Most of the shots in this book are in rural areas with nobody around, not in cities or towns. I’d wager that in the average small town, their presence would not be tolerated, thanks to anti-loitering and vagrancy ordinances. Burlington, Vermont, has a small population of young homeless people, which is why the public libraries are getting crowded. Tempe, Arizona, has always had its share, as does Washington State, Oregon, and California.

A period of Juvenile Prosperity isn’t the first book of such photos. Back in 1980, Mary Ellen Mark did a photo essay called Streetwise, about homeless youth in Seattle. Those of you that read the book, and saw Martin Bell’s documentary of the same name, know that Seattle was a city that tolerated these kids. They didn’t have to hop freight trains and leave the city. But at the same time, a lot of the kids profiled in the documentary would end up on drugs, alcohol, have lots of children by absent men, and lead unsuccessful lives.

Brodie says that he went back to school and became a diesel mechanic, but eventually quit that. I would like to have seen more photos from his days in Oregon with the vegans, or his life in Philadelphia. I imagine that city has plenty of abandoned houses to crash in, though I wonder why the same thing doesn’t happen in the Bronx. Are these white kids afraid to go there? Maybe that tells you a lot about it too.