Boredom came first: on long drives through South and Central Florida during visits home from Brooklyn, Daniel Dorsa made the photographs that became Paradise, his first book, published in 2021.
The title takes up a promise Daniel Dorsa does not quite trust. He is the son of Cuban and Italian immigrants, raised in a suburb outside West Palm Beach, and the state has held his attention since childhood. The book comes from later, after he left. He was living in Brooklyn by then, and Florida had become a place he came home to rather than a place he simply lived.
He described those visits as times of contrast, “a fondness and nostalgia for home meeting intense boredom and a preoccupation with the fallacy of the Floridian promise of ‘paradise.’” Boredom, in other words, did some of the work. On trips back he drove long distances across the south and centre of the state, looking for stimulation and for relief from a loneliness he had felt there for years. The photographs came out of those drives.
The book keeps two moods in play at once. There is isolation, and there is a liveliness that seems peculiar to Florida; there is the immense natural wonder of the place, and there is its breakdown. Dorsa wanted every frame to register a return and, in the same moment, something found. His belief is that “every part of Florida can bring you to a new world.”
Set side by side, his two statements pull in opposite directions. One calls the promise of paradise a fallacy; the other says any part of the state can open onto a new world. Paradise declines to choose between them.
