In “Florida Boys,” Josh Aronson explores what remains of adolescence when the noise of screens and the postures imposed by society are removed. For five years, between 2020 and 2025, he traveled the back roads of Florida and staged young men in the forests, springs, and swamps of the South. The photographer speaks of “a series of staged photographs,” but the term conceals the essential: Aronson is not trying to fabricate fiction; he is attempting to create a space where masculine vulnerability becomes possible again.
The beautiful cover image entitled Creek, 2024 — a group of boys perched on a fallen tree above a pond — seems spontaneous, almost captured on the fly. It was, of course, composed with the rigor of a painting. “The images blur the boundary between documentation and fiction,” he explains. This ambiguity is the key to the series: the artist stages encounters between young people who did not know each other and landscapes they discover for the first time. The scene is not a memory; it is a promise.
Josh Aronson, a regular contributor to The New York Times among other major publications, collaborates here with groups of boys often from immigrant or first-generation families in the United States, belonging to the creative communities of Miami. He does not seek to produce a manifesto on masculinity: he observes how proximity emerges between strangers and how, through the simple act of posing, their bodies relax, open up, recognize one another. His influences are openly stated: the narrative photography of Justine Kurland and Ryan McGinley, Gregory Crewdson, Jeff Wall, as well as coming-of-age cinema and Floridian mythologies. The atmosphere, which in some ways is also reminiscent of the Netflix series Stranger Things, thickens in the images of marshes and springs, where the light blends beauty and danger. “The series explores the archetype of the Southern American boy through scenes of tenderness, vulnerability, and play.”
The photographic gesture becomes a tool for rewriting a territory long associated with hardened masculinity, humming with rivalry and solitude. The project is rooted in Aronson’s intimate geography: born in Canada but raised in Florida, he knows these landscapes physically — the humid heat of summer, the menacing silence of black lakes, the porous borders between paradise and peril. “Florida Boys unfolds like a fantasy; a fictionalized South where masculinity is porous, communal, and without armor.”
Through this visual writing, he hints at another adolescence: slow, tactile, free of irony or performance. If Josh Aronson’s boys sometimes seem suspended, it is because they embody a possibility — that of a South that does not need to harden itself in order to stand. By revealing sensitivity as a form of strength, the series sketches a language in which intimacy is not a flaw, but a way of being in the world.
“Florida Boys,” by Josh Aronson, was exhibited in Miami in November 2025. He is represented by the Baker–Hall gallery. More information about Josh Aronson can be found on his website and Instagram.
