A series of staged photos made across the backroads of Florida by photographer Josh Aronson (previously featured here). Between 2020 and 2025, Aronson worked with groups of young men to construct scenes of male tenderness, vulnerability, and play in the outdoors. For a generation raised on screens, the work creates a counter-narrative to the epidemic of isolation and toxic masculinity currently shaping their lives. The series is set in forests, springs, and swamps with a cast of youth from cities much like the one in which he grew up, without access to these kind of open spaces:
“Drawing from the language of tableaux painting, Southern photographic archives, and coming-of-age cinema, Florida Boys asks what tenderness might mean in a world that mistakes hardness for strength. Presented as an outdoor installation in the gallery garden, intimate and large-scale pigment prints, and an assemblage installation, the series looks for softness within a culture that 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 now until November 22nd.
