‘A tour de force!’: LensCulture Critics’ Choice awards – in pictures

Josh Aronson (United States): Florida Boys

‘This series uses staged narrative photography to imagine a version of Americana boyhood I never experienced. I grew up queer, first-generation, and distanced from the rural, white, masculine ideals that have historically shaped visual culture in the American south. Rather than reclaim that mythology, these photographs aim to inhabit it briefly – to question it, bend it and make room for other kinds of presence: tender, strange and vulnerable. Working with groups of young men, I stage improvised scenes across rural Florida’