“Florida, like a piece of embroidery, has two sides to it—one side all ragged and tangled, without order or position; and the other side showing flowers and intricate patterns and brilliant colors.” — Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Palmetto Leaves”
As Florida Boys begins, I return to a question that lies at the heart of my work: how do you belong to a place that both welcomes and pushes you away?
I moved to Florida from Canada when I was three. My family had no relatives in the United States. Although my parents grew up in Toronto, they were first-generation children of Middle Eastern and Eastern European immigrants. This, among other things, made growing up in Florida a strange experience—both comforting and isolating.
As a child, I found solace in the outdoors. It was the times I spent biking on wooded trails, wrestling with my brother in the grass, and searching for small creatures that shaped my early happiness. But I didn’t really know Florida then. I only knew its outskirts—the suburbs, the malls, the highways lined with palm trees. We never saw the springs, the swamps, or the forests. We didn’t realize how vast it was.
For a long time, I believed nature was neutral, that anyone could feel at home there. Now I understand it never was. The American landscape is built on a hierarchy of who could relax, wander, or feel safe within it. Many early leaders of the National Park Service and the conservation movement held troubling eugenics beliefs and removed Indigenous people from their ancestral lands to uphold the myth of “untouched” nature.* Segregation and violence determined who had access to wilderness and who didn’t. For many Black and Brown people in America, the outdoors was not a place of freedom but one of exploitation and fear. This history lies, often unseen, beneath the surface of the land.
Florida Boys started as an effort to look more closely, to step into the land I had come to admire and ask what stories it held. Over five years, I traveled Florida’s backroads with groups of young men, many of them first-generation like me, 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 flaws, and the imagined communities of young men who could live in it.
Today, many young men’s lives unfold through the glow of a screen. Their sense of self is shaped by endless streams of aggressive content, body optimization videos, and podcast monologues about dominance and control. The Internet has replaced the open field as a gathering place. My work offers an alternative to the isolation and performance that often define modern masculinity.
In late 2020, I invited four boys (one I had 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, looking for people who also felt connected to Florida’s unique character. I wanted collaborators, not subjects, who could help me explore what boyhood looks like and could be 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 old songs in parking lots. I didn’t develop the film from that trip for almost three years, but I knew something had clicked. I had found a way to see home differently.
The trips that followed were longer and more ambitious.Every time, the van filled with new faces. Every time, the work evolved. I started exploring the Florida State Archives and discovered photographs from the Florida School for Boys, a notorious reform school known for abuse and unexplained deaths. That archive stayed with me, clashing with the tenderness I aimed to capture. I reflected on Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, on the South as both a cradle and a wound. I thought of Frank Ocean’s Blonde, how it evoked the humid, emotional ache of growing up in Florida.
Glorious, 2025, archival pigment print
© Josh Aronson
Lucidity, 2025, archival pigment print
© Josh Aronson
The photographs became tableaux, dreamlike reconstructions of youth and landscape. I considered Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures and Ryan McGinley’s van trips, how artists transform friendship and freedom into their medium. I borrowed their methods but changed the cast. What if a Renoir painting—filled with white pastoral leisure—was instead populated by young, queer, Black and Brown men from Miami? What if the American landscape could embrace them with the same grace?
For me, making photographs is a way to reclaim a sense of belonging. Photography lets me imagine fitting in somewhere and makes that fantasy a bit more real by visualizing it. It’s about insisting that community, vulnerability, and softness exist in places where they were once denied or rarely shown.
Surrender, 2025, archival pigment print
© Josh Aronson
Eclipse, 2025, archival pigment print
© Josh Aronson
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 was bitten raw by mosquitoes. We’d laugh, fall silent, drift into conversations about home, music, fear. Those quiet moments 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 show boys embracing, resting, seeing each other as companions, not rivals. In this way, the South became a stage for reinvention, where intimacy could look like survival.
Vast Night, 2025, archival pigment print
© Josh Aronson
Headbashers, 2025, archival pigment print
© Josh Aronson
Florida itself is a metaphor—lush and decaying, beautiful and brutal. The state’s mythology, from tropical postcards to 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, reminding me that memory itself is a kind of photography: selective, unpredictable, tender. The pictures changed with time, just as I did.
Swamp, 2025, archival pigment print
© Josh Aronson
Dunes, 2025, archival pigment print
© Josh Aronson
Closely, 2025, archival pigment print
© Josh Aronson
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. I’ve learned that to photograph 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
Capsized,2025, archival pigment print
© Josh Aronson
About the Artist
Josh Aronson (born 1994, Canada) is an artist based in Miami. His work examines masculinity and the landscape of the American South. His photography has been featured in publications such as 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.
www.josharonson.us
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of helpful and clear FAQs about the documentary Florida Boys by Josh Aronson
General Beginner Questions
Q What is Florida Boys about
A Its a documentary that follows a group of teenage boys in a small Florida town as they navigate friendship family and their dreams while preparing for their high schools annual Mr Indian River pageant
Q Who is Josh Aronson
A Josh Aronson is the director and producer of the documentary He is an awardwinning filmmaker known for his work on documentaries that explore social and cultural themes
Q Where can I watch Florida Boys
A The film has been featured at various film festivals For the most uptodate information on where to stream or purchase it its best to check the official website or platforms like iTunes Amazon Prime or dedicated documentary channels
Q Is this a reality TV show or a documentary
A It is a documentary It captures reallife events and the genuine experiences of the boys rather than being a scripted or produced reality show
Themes Deeper Meaning
Q What are the main themes of the documentary
A The main themes include the complexities of modern masculinity the pressures of smalltown life the pursuit of dreams friendship family dynamics and the transition from adolescence to adulthood
Q Why is the Mr Indian River pageant so important in the film
A The pageant serves as a central goal and a metaphor It represents a chance for the boys to be seen to achieve something and to define themselves all while highlighting the communitys values and expectations
Q What does the film say about growing up in a small town
A It shows both the supportive closeknit community aspect and the feeling of being limited or trapped where opportunities can feel scarce and the pressure to conform is strong
Q Is the film just about these specific boys or does it have a broader message
A While it focuses on a specific group its themes are universal Its a comingofage story that resonates with anyone who has faced the challenges of growing up figuring out their identity and chasing their ambitions
Practical ViewerFocused Questions