Florida Boys (2020—) is an ongoing body of work of staged narrative photographs made along the backroads of Florida. Growing up in urban and suburban Miami, and having immigrated to the United States at age three, I had little access to the kinds of landscapes pictured here. I use photography to imagine new relationships: to place myself, and others like me, within spaces and stories from which we have often felt absent. For many of the young men I photograph, these trips mark a first encounter with the springs, forests, rivers, and backroads of their home state. In that sense, the work is not only about representation, but access: to landscape, to one another, and to forms of freedom and belonging often taken for granted. The project is built through both road trips and research. I invite young men from the broader South Florida community to travel with me through Central and North Florida, often as strangers to one another, and more often to me. Over the course of several days, the road becomes a site of collaboration, trust, and transformation. Friendships form through the act of moving together, looking together, and making pictures together. I think of the work as a form of world-building. Its visual language draws from nineteenth-century painting, Southern photographic archives, coming-of-age cinema, literature, and vernacular materials gathered along the way. These pages offer a glimpse into that expanded universe: a kaleidoscopic field of photographs, references, and fragments that shape the world of Florida Boys. I preset this work with gratitude to the Florida boys who made it possible; to Amanda Baker, who invited me to present this assemblage for the first time at her Miami gallery; to Jon Witzky and Emily Earl, who offered me space for it in these pages; and to the creatives and creatures of the American South who welcomed me into their orbit. Miami, too, lives within the imagination of the South.

With gratitude,

Josh Aronson

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