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.
Vast Night, 2025, archival pigment print© Josh Aronson
