‘Florida Boys’ is a series of staged photographs made across Florida’s backroads between 2020 and 2025. Working with groups of young men in forests, springs and swamps, Josh Aronson explores tenderness, vulnerability and play as alternatives to inherited ideas of masculinity.

The work brings together groups of young men in outdoor settings to construct scenes of connection that can feel increasingly rare for a generation shaped by screens and isolation. Set within Florida’s landscapes, the photographs imagine boyhood as something gentle, open and communal rather than guarded or competitive.

Aronson casts first-generation youth from cities and suburbs, many of whom, like himself, grew up without access to this kind of expressive space. Drawing on the visual language of tableaux painting, Southern archives and coming-of-age cinema, the project uses staging to slow down inherited ideas of masculinity and propose another vision rooted in care, intimacy and shared presence within the landscape.

Artist Bio

Josh Aronson is a Miami-based artist of Iraqi and Polish heritage. His work explores identity, belonging and the intersection of masculinity and the Southern landscape. Rooted in a staged, narrative approach, his practice emphasises collaboration with his subjects, weaving shared relationships and environments into tableau-like images.

His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions in Miami, Chicago and Russia. His photographs have been published in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Financial Times, Frieze, Dazed and i-D, among others. His artist book ‘Tropicana’ is held in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Library of Congress.