Daylight School is a photography school, but we don’t just offer basic courses, street photography courses, or photojournalism courses—our commitment goes beyond that.
Our mission is to promote photography, tell stories, and inform.
A photographer’s body of work is a puzzle of moments that trace their journey—consecutive instants that are sometimes indecipherable in the moment, yet often propel the human being, often without their realizing it, upward toward the spirit.
The first step that set Mike Brody on his journey of discovery came when he was 17, when he hopped on a train for the first time, thinking it was headed for Mobile, but which actually took him to Jacksonville, the capital of Florida, from where he returned home a few days later.
What is, in fact, a fleeting journey that goes against all expectations will turn out to be a pivotal moment in his experience as a young man—a seed that will sprout over time.
Photography, like fiction and music, like cinema and painting, thrives on special effects—images that take hold of us and become part of who we are.
The setting for our story is the America of boundless expanses crisscrossed by lonely railroads lost in snow and dust, the Disunited States of America steeped in Yankee myths—a country so young that it was forced to hastily put down new roots.
It was here, and because of this place, that the phenomenon known as “train hopping” took root once the first rail was laid. This practice involves hopping on freight trains to travel cheaply (and illegally) from one part of the American continent to another, across endless miles of restless souls in perpetual horizontal motion—in search of work, in search of fortune, or on the run from the police.
These are the same themes sung by Bob Dylan in “Slow Train” or “Freight Train Blues”—songs that evoke Jack Kerouac’s amphetamine-fueled journeys, captured in ink on paper in *On the Road*, or the aimless wanderings of Gregory Corso, who inspired Dylan and many others.
"Terrible rascals driven by the fire of their life force and a fair amount of stimulants"—one might be tempted to simplify this into a dichotomy that sounds vaguely bourgeois.
The second piece of the puzzle regarding our antihero is the discovery, in the backseat of a friend’s car, of a Polaroid SX70—a device he had never seen before, yet one that would become the perfect tool for bringing order to his emotions. So much so that, once he returned home, everyone began calling him “Polaroid Kid,” a nickname he would use during his formative years as he documented his friends’ lives with the raw talent of an outsider.
The year 2004 marked the beginning of a journey that would take him 80,000 kilometers across the heartland and outlying regions of the United States, as he compulsively photographed his personal adventure—filled with trains, hitchhiking, hippie communities, punks, drugs, travelers, and lost souls—an experience during which he traded his Polaroid for a small-format analog Nikon.
The visual outcome of his personal journey is a series of intimate and extraordinary images—shots that reveal the vitality of a unique style, alternating between delicacy and raw imagery in an ideal continuation of reflections on old ghosts from the past that still linger.
*A Period of Juvenile Prosperity* marks the transition from Polaroid Kid to Mike Brody—the cocoon that becomes a butterfly—a personal evolution that has given us a book emblematic of a generation, a work that has garnered awards and acclaim worldwide, even from the “art market” that the author himself finds so hard to stomach.
It will be Mike himself who jumps off the fast-moving train of popularity to work as a mechanic in the oil fields, disappearing forever from the world of photography—or maybe not.
What remains is his journey, the unstoppable flow of his photography—a gesture so sincere and natural that it becomes time, rhythm, breath, music, joy, and inspiration.
Marco Sconocchia
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