Florida Boys
Florida Boys is a five-year photographic project by Florida-based artist Josh Aronson that explores coming-of-age in the American South. Traveling through Florida’s backroads with groups of young men, Aronson stages scenes of tenderness, play, and belonging against landscapes that are both idyllic and decaying. His collaborators, often first-generation kids from cities and suburbs, mirror his own experience growing up in Florida’s shifting cultural terrain. Drawing from the history of Florida reform schools, nineteenth-century tableaux paintings, and the tradition of staged narrative photography, Florida Boys broadens what images of boyhood can look like: gentle, vulnerable, and rooted in place. The series transforms Florida’s mythic imagery into a site of reflection on masculinity, ecology, and community.
