Florida Boys
Josh Aronson, detail of Florida Boys, 2024. Dye sublimated fabric triptych on metal frame. 291 3⁄4 x 250 inches. Commissioned by the City of Miami Beach. Documentation by Jeanne Canto. Courtesy of the artist.
The Florida seen through Josh Aronson’s camera lens is full of vivacity and warmth, intermixed with a fleeting feeling of “being home but also apart.” In his motion-filled compositions, figures indulge in laughter, sun, and epicurean youth. While his subjects frequently find themselves in outdoor settings, their expressions are captured in a moment of interiority, frequently nuancing rigid notions of masculinity. Aronson says, “Youth, for me, is a muse for reimagining my own story.”
Recently, the Miami-based photographer turned one of his photos, Spring, into a public art project at the Catalina Hotel as part of Miami Beach’s No Vacancy program. The piece subsequently won both the People’s Choice Award and the Juror’s Prize. In this interview, Aronson shares the inspiration behind his photographic series Florida Boys, the ways his filmmaking background influences his practice now, and the evolving art scene in Miami.
Xuezhu Jenny Wang: Could you share more about the ideation of Florida Boys? What were some sources of inspiration, and how did it unfold?
Josh Aronson: Florida Boys comes from my lived experience. I grew up in Florida, surrounded by its landscape—so much of my childhood played out outdoors. But I’ve always felt like an insider-outsider here. I was born in Toronto and moved to Florida when I was three, and that lens—of being home but also apart—shaped how I see this place and the people in it.
At its core, the project comes from a need to see more images that reflect people like me. Pictures of young men being open, tender, or playful in nature exist, but they’re rare. I feel a responsibility to create those images—not just for myself, but for others who might need to see them too.
I looked to artists like Baldwin Lee, Mary Frey, and Gordon Parks for thematic and formal inspiration. Even older works, like The Swimming Hole by Thomas Eakins or Martin Munkácsi’s Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika, informed my thinking. But what really anchored me was archival photography, especially from the Florida School for Boys collection in the State Library and Archives of Florida. Those everyday snapshots—boys in school uniforms outdoors, working or at leisure—felt like a historical mirror. As I dug into the school’s history and uncovered the abuse and violence there, Florida Boys became a kind of reimagining. It’s a visual “what if”—what if those boys had escaped? What if they had the space to just exist, to be young, to define themselves outside of that history?
Josh Aronson, Creek, 2020, printed 2024. Archival pigment print. 54 1⁄2 x 40 inches. Edition of 6 + 2 APs. Courtesy of the artist.
XJW: Much of your work centers on the energizing vibrancy of youth. Can you elaborate on this and the abundance of movement and color in your work?
JA: I started in filmmaking before photography, and I think that really shaped how I approach images. Filmmaking taught me to think about motion—how movement tells a story, how it can make a moment feel alive. When I shifted to still photography, I brought that sensibility with me. I wanted my pictures to feel cinematic, like they’re alive.
I’m self-taught, so I’ve learned a lot by studying other photographers. Ryan McGinley and Viviane Sassen, in particular, sparked my love for movement in still images. And color? That comes from Miami. Growing up, I came from Toronto’s city streets, and Miami hit me like a shock of tropical color—vivid, electric, almost overwhelming. That palette is embedded in the way I work.
Youth, for me, is a muse for reimagining my own story. I grew up feeling like an outsider—someone who didn’t quite fit the ideas of masculinity and identity around me. Photography became a way to rewrite that, to imagine a version of my coming of age where tenderness and camaraderie felt natural. These images create the world I wanted to see for myself—a space to explore belonging, and a shared language of vulnerability and strength that was missing in my own experience. It’s deeply personal.
Josh Aronson, Climbers, 2022, printed 2024. Archival pigment print. 54 1⁄2 x 40 inches. Edition of 6 + 2 APs. Courtesy of the artist.
XJW: When did you move to Florida? What do you think of the art scene there? How is it different or similar to other parts of the world?
JA: I moved to Florida in 1997, when I was three. Growing up, I couldn’t wait to leave. I thought I needed to leave to find culture, to find people I could connect with. I was too young to realize that it was all happening here. Miami in the 2000s and 2010s was alive—the Rubell, De la Cruz, and Margulies collections were growing, Art Basel arrived, and studio space was affordable.
When I left in 2012 for college, I spent four years in Chicago then three living and working in New York. I thought I’d stay, but the pandemic pulled me back to Miami in 2020. That’s when everything shifted for me. I found my community here—other artists who are just as fascinated by Florida’s contradictions as I am.
Miami’s art scene is unique. The collectors are approachable, the funding is solid, and while it doesn’t have the scale of New York or LA, it’s a place where you can carve out space for yourself. Miami’s always been this mix of cultures—Caribbean, Black, and Latin—and that energy fuels the city. It’s young, still growing, and it feels worth investing in. But that growth comes with challenges—gentrification is pushing out communities, and the climate crisis threatens the land itself. These struggles give Miami its urgency—a constant tension between beauty and fragility, resilience and precarity.
For me, it feels important to stay, to root myself here, and to contribute to a cultural conversation that often feels dominated by capital interests. Miami—and Florida as a whole—deserves artists who are deeply invested in its complexities and contradictions, who aren’t just passing through but are shaping the conversation from within. It’s not just about making work here; it’s about being present, part of a community, and reshaping how this place is seen and understood. That’s what inspires me and drives my practice.
Josh Aronson, installation view of Florida Boys, 2024. Dye sublimated fabric triptych on metal frame. 291 3⁄4 x 250 inches. Commissioned by the City of Miami Beach. Documentation by Jeanne Canto. Courtesy of the artist.
XJW: For No Vacancy 2024, how did you adapt Spring to this commercial space? Is this your first time creating public art? What reactions were you hoping to elicit?
JA: For No Vacancy, I printed Spring on fabric and suspended it as three massive panels in the lobby of the Catalina Hotel in Miami Beach. The entire installation spanned 25 by 20 feet, hanging in front of the two-story window. It was my first time creating public art and working with fabric as a medium for installation, but fabric has been central to my work since the beginning. I’ve used fabric as a backdrop in my portrait photography from my earliest images, so working with it in this new context felt like a natural progression.
The photograph Spring depicts a group of young men floating in harmony on the shimmering waters of a Florida spring. Their hairstyles and colorful bathing suits suggest a more expansive idea of masculinity. It felt like the perfect image for Miami Beach—a city defined by its relationship to water, its allure to travelers, and its position at the forefront of climate change. Also, Miami Beach’s history as a haven for queer culture felt especially tied to this image.
The space itself—the hotel’s historic architecture, the sunlight streaming through that huge window—shaped my thinking. I saw the window as a portal to the outside world, so I wanted to transform it into something immersive. The fabric, the ebb and flow of it, was meant to echo the ocean just outside.
I was thinking about tourists—the ones who come to Miami for the beach and rarely see beyond it. I wanted to show them another Florida, something more rooted in the land and the people here. I hope Spring inspires viewers to see nature as a haven, a shared space of belonging, and to reflect on the importance of protecting these environments.
Portrait of Josh Aronson by Angie Vero. Courtesy of the artist.
XJW: I’d love to know more about your commercial photography practice. Do you draw a line between commercial work and personal work?
JA: For me, the two are intertwined. My commercial work funds my personal projects, and my personal projects inspire editors and clients to call me. It’s a cycle. I’m open to the blurring of lines between art and commerce. I think images take on new meanings depending on where they’re seen.
Some of my editorial projects—like the queer activists I photographed for i-D or my skunk ape story for Islandia Journal—feel just as personal as my art. I’ve even imagined a survey show that includes these series alongside my personal work. I look to artists like Wolfgang Tillmans, who move fluidly between these spaces, as inspiration for how I navigate both worlds.
Whether I’m photographing for a magazine or working on my personal practice, I’m always coming back to the same questions—how does identity connect to place, and how can photography be a collaboration? Both contexts let me explore how the people in front of my camera relate to their surroundings, and I’m always thinking about what those relationships can reveal. In that way, the line between personal and commercial work starts to feel less like a boundary and more like a conversation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
