‘Florida Boys’: Josh Aronson’s Tender Rewriting of Southern Masculinity

In Florida Boys, Miami based artist Josh Aronson explores the American South through a lens of tenderness and care. Made between 2020 and 2025 across Florida’s backroads, the five year series stages groups of young men in landscapes that shift between paradise and ruin, from forests thick with humidity to springs that shimmer and swamps that conceal. The photographs trace moments of rest, touch, and ease among them, gestures that feel almost radical within the frameworks of masculinity that dominate Southern iconography.

Aronson shares with Something Curated, “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 bitten raw by mosquitoes. We’d laugh, fall silent, drift into conversations about home, music, fear. Those moments, the quiet ones 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 picture boys embracing, resting, and seeing each other as companions, not rivals.

The South, in this way, became a stage for reinvention. Here, intimacy could look like survival. Florida itself is a metaphor. Lush and decaying. Beautiful and brutal. The state’s mythology, from its tropical postcards to its 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.”

Photography courtesy Josh Aronson