Words and images by Josh Aronson
“Florida, like a piece of embroidery, has two sides to it—one side all tag-rag and thrums, without order or position; and the other side showing flowers and arabesques and brilliant coloring.” - Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Palmetto Leaves”
As Florida Boys opens, I return to a question that remains at the heart of my work: how do you belong to a place that both embraces and excludes you?
I immigrated to Florida from Canada when I was three. My family had no relatives in the United States. Though my parents were raised in Toronto, they were first-generation children of Middle Eastern and Eastern European immigrants. This and more made growing up in Florida a strange experience both warm and alienating.
As a child, I found refuge in the outdoors. It was the moments spent biking on forested paths, wrestling with my brother in the grass, and hunting for critters that defined my early sense of joy. But I didn’t know Florida yet. I knew only its edges—the suburbs, the malls, the highways lined with palms. We didn’t see the springs, the swamps, or the forests. We didn’t know how vast it was.
For a long time, I thought nature was neutral, that anyone could belong there. I understand now that it never was. The American landscape is built on a hierarchy of who could rest, roam, or feel safe within it. Multiple founding figures of the National Park Service and the broader conservation movement held deeply problematic eugenics beliefs and displaced Indigenous people from their native homelands to maintain myths of “pristine” nature.* Segregation and violence shaped who had access to wilderness and who did not. For many Black and Brown people in America, the outdoors was not a site of freedom but of exploitation and fear. It’s a history that sits, often invisibly, beneath the surface of the soil.
Florida Boys began as an attempt to look closer, to step into the land I’d come to admire and ask what stories it carried. Over five years, I traveled Florida’s backroads with groups of young men, many of them first-generation like me, many who had also grown up without access to these places. The series became a kind of portrait. Not of any one person, but of Florida with its beauty and its faults, and the imagined communities of young men who could inhabit it.
Today, many young men’s worlds unfold through the glow of a screen. Sense of self is shaped by endless scrolls of aggressive content,** body optimisation videos, and podcast monologues about dominance and control. The Internet has replaced the open field as a place of gathering. My work offers a counterpoint to the isolation and performance that often shape contemporary masculinity.
In late 2020, I invited four boys (one I’d photographed before and three I hadn’t met yet) on a road trip. I found them through Instagram, scrolling through friends of friends’ tagged posts, searching for people who also felt connected to Florida’s strange DNA. I wanted collaborators, not subjects, who could help me explore what boyhood looks and could look like here in the Sunshine State.
That first trip began in Miami and wound north toward Big Talbot Island, Lake Apopka, and the Wekiva River. We drove for hours, stopped to swim, ate drive-through burgers, and sang along to oldies in parking lots. I didn’t process the film from that trip for nearly three years, but I knew something had clicked. I had found a way to see home differently.
The trips that followed were longer, more ambitious. Each time, the van filled with new faces. Each time, the work changed. I began looking at the Florida State Archives and found photographs from the Florida School for Boys, an infamous reform school marked by abuse and mysterious deaths. That archive haunted me. It stood in contrast to the tenderness I wanted to capture. I thought about Peter Matthiesen’s Shadow Country and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, about the South as both cradle and wound. I thought about Frank Ocean’s Blonde, how it sounded like the humid, emotional aching of.growing up in Florida.
The photographs became tableaux, dreamlike reconstructions of youth and landscape. I thought about Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures, about Ryan McGinley’s van trips, about what happens when artists turn friendship and freedom into their medium. I borrowed their approach but changed the cast. What if a Renoir painting – filled with white pastoral leisure – was instead peopled by young, queer, Black and Brown men from Miami? What if the American landscape could hold them with the same grace?
Making photographs is, for me, a way to reclaim a sense of belonging. Photography allows me to imagine belonging somewhere and to make that fantasy a bit more real through the act of visualizing it. It is to insist that community, vulnerability, and softness exist in spaces where they were once denied or rarely pictured.
Florida Boys has always been about collaboration, what happens when you bring strangers together and ask them to recreate or improvise a scene. By the end of each trip, our clothes were soaked and our skin bitten raw by mosquitoes. We’d laugh, fall silent, drift into conversations about home, music, fear. Those moments, the quiet ones between pictures, are the ones that live on in the images.
Through this work, I’ve tried to envision masculinity as something porous, something that breathes. I wanted to picture boys embracing, resting, and seeing each other as companions, not rivals. The South, in this way, became a stage for reinvention. Here, intimacy could look like survival.
Florida itself is a metaphor. Lush and decaying. Beautiful and brutal. The state’s mythology, from its tropical postcards to its dark histories, mirrors the contradictions of the American project. I wanted to hold together both the dream and the disillusionment. The result, I think, is a portrait of a place always on the verge of vanishing.
Working with film gave me distance. I often didn’t see what I’d made until years later. That delay became part of the process. It reminded me that memory itself is a kind of photography: selective, unpredictable, tender. The pictures changed with time, just as I did.
In the end, Florida Boys is a love letter. To Florida, to the boys who became my collaborators, to the idea that the camera can make space for softness. For five years, this project was how I asked what it means to belong somewhere that has always felt divided. To photograph, I’ve learned, is to bridge that distance–-to turn the ache of estrangement into something like empathy.
**Josh Aronson’s Florida Boys is on view at Baker–Hall, Miami through November 22, 2025. **
*National Park Service. Complicating Conservation. U.S. Department of the Interior, 17 July 2024, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/complicating-conservation.htm
**Common Sense Media. Boys in the Digital Wild: Online Culture, Identity, and Well-Being. 8 Oct. 2025, https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/boys-in-the-digital-wild-online-culture-identity-and-well-being
Josh Aronson (b. 1994, Canada) is a Miami-based artist whose work explores masculinity and landscape in the American South. His photographs have appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Financial Times, Frieze, Italian Vogue, Teen Vogue, Dazed, i-D, British Journal of Photography, Document Journal, and Apartamento.
