Florida Boys
By Josh Aronson
Florida Boys is a series of staged photographs made across Florida’s backroads between 2020 and 2025. Working with groups of young men, I constructed scenes of male tenderness, vulnerability, and play in the outdoors; moments of connection that feel increasingly rare in a generation raised on screens. The work pushes against the epidemic of isolation and toxic masculinity shaping young men’s lives today, visible in everything from social media radicalization to the rise of mass shootings and political violence.
Set in forests, springs, and swamps, my images reimagine boyhood as something gentle and communal rather than guarded or competitive. I cast first-generation youth from cities and suburbs, many of whom, like myself, grew up without access to this kind of open, expressive space.
Drawing from the language of tableaux painting, Southern archives, and coming-of-age cinema, Florida Boys asks what tenderness might mean in a world that mistakes hardness for strength. Presented as intimate and large-scale pigment prints, the series looks for softness within a culture that too often equates masculinity with dominance, finding brief, fragile spaces where another kind of boyhood might exist.
Josh Aronson’s Florida Boys is on view at Baker–Hall, Miami from October 18-November 22, 2025.
Short Biography:
Josh Aronson (b. Toronto, Canada) is a Florida-based artist whose work explores masculinity and landscape in the American South. He was raised in Florida by Iraqi and Polish parents who immigrated to the United States when he was 3. Aronson’s photographs have appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Financial Times, Frieze, Teen Vogue, Italian Vogue, Dazed, i-D, British Journal of Photography, Document Journal, The Guardian, and Apartamento.
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New: The Raw Society is organizing a photography & storytelling festival in Menorca, Spain! Find out more here and stay tuned for programming details and open call info.
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❤️🔥
Beyond beautiful 💫