The Dream and the Decay: Joshua Lutz’s Orange Blossom Trail
Welcome to this edition of [book spotlight]. Today, we uncover the layers of 'Orange Blossom Trail,' by Joshua Lutz (published by Image Text Ithaca). We'd love to read your comments below about these insights and ideas behind the artist's work.
At sunrise on the Orange Blossom Trail, the past still lingers.
This road was once a promise—lined with orange groves, motels, and the dream of a better life. Now, it’s a stretch of fading signs, struggling businesses, and people trying to survive. Joshua Lutz’s Orange Blossom Trail doesn’t just show what’s there; it reveals what’s been lost. His images don’t ask for sympathy, but they make you look at what most would rather ignore.
It’s about what happens when an idea of success collapses, and the people left behind have to keep going. Lutz captures that without easy answers—only moments that feel raw and real.
Beneath the orange groves, another story is buried—one few want to tell.
Orange Blossom Trail
Joshua Lutz’s Orange Blossom Trail is a raw and immersive look at a once-promising stretch of road that now tells a different story—one of labor, loss, and survival. Once a scenic route through Florida’s booming citrus industry, the Orange Blossom Trail became a symbol of economic decline, shifting from a highway of dreams to a corridor of forgotten motels, struggling businesses, and the people left behind.
Lutz’s photographs, paired with three texts by acclaimed writer George Saunders, examine the tension between the myths of prosperity and the reality of those who live in its aftermath. The book is not just about a place; it’s about what happens when an idea of success unravels, leaving behind remnants of hope and hardship.
Through a mix of color and black-and-white images, Orange Blossom Trail captures fleeting moments—empty streets, neon signs flickering in daylight, workers laboring under an unforgiving sun. Without romanticizing or moralizing, Lutz offers a stark meditation on inequality, resilience, and the weight of history. (Image Text Ithaca, Amazon)
What inspired you to focus on the Orange Blossom Trail as a subject, and how did it shape the narrative and photographic direction of the project?
There’s always a link from one project to the next—something unresolved that carries over. Sometimes it’s an idea, other times an actual image. For *Orange Blossom Trail*, the connection came from a photograph I took for *Mind the Gap*. It was of an unhoused veteran living in temporary Section 8 housing. He was incredibly gracious in letting me photograph him, and there was something poignant about him holding an orange that stuck with me.
At the time, I didn’t know I was on the Orange Blossom Trail. Even when I returned to photograph the region, I wasn’t fully aware of its significance. It wasn’t until I spent more time there, digging into its history and context, that the specifics of the place began to reveal themselves. Like all my projects, what it starts as is never what it becomes. This sense of discovery—of the story evolving organically—shaped the entire direction of the work.
Could you share a specific moment or discovery during this process that fundamentally reshaped the direction or focus of the project?
A few months into the project, I uncovered these old Orange Blossom Trail brochures, artifacts of mid-century optimism, printed annually from the 1940s through the 1960s. Inside, there were maps—meticulously drawn routes charting a journey through central Florida’s orange groves, highlighting often unbuilt leisure spots, all the way down to the Florida Keys. They offered a vision of movement, of progress, of something quintessentially American: the idea that happiness could be found just down the road, perhaps even purchased. What struck me most was the dissonance between the polished dream these brochures sold and the reality of the trail as it exists today. The pristine, idyllic journeys they promised felt worlds apart from the layers of neglect, resilience, and reinvention I encountered. That clash—between aspiration and reality—became impossible to ignore
How do you approach the challenge of combining photography with written narratives to create a unified story that resonates with viewers?
It’s different for every project. For *Meadowlands*, I convinced Robert Sullivan to write something, and his piece set the tone for a journey of getting lost. In *Hesitating Beauty*, I used a mix of real and imagined texts to build a narrative that comes together and falls apart. In *Mind the Gap*, I wrote short stories in different formats—letters, recipes, and academic-style writing.
For *Orange Blossom Trail*, the text came last, but it shaped the structure of the book. I worked with Saunders’ text to create an arc from birth through labor to death. Each project requires its own approach, but the goal is always to create a dialogue between the text and images, where they enhance and build on each other.
Your photographs convey a deep sense of alienation and reflection. What techniques do you use to evoke such strong emotions in your work?
Photography is really simple—it’s just a lens, aperture, and shutter. You can learn most of that in an afternoon; the rest is figuring out what you want to say. There’s nothing special about my techniques except that I spend a lot of time quietly walking and looking.
If you go anywhere and make the effort to slow down, you’ll begin to tap into what’s happening around you. The work is in the effort it takes to do so.
How does the photographic medium allow you to delve into complex themes like labor, inequality, and societal disconnection in ways that other art forms might not?
I suppose the thing that distinguishes photography from other forms is its relationship to truth. Not to say that it’s a truthful medium, but it does have a unique relationship to truth. At the very least, we can agree that there’s a certain truth in the fact that light bounced off the objects the camera was focused on and exposed what was behind the shutter. If we can agree on that, then photography becomes unique in whatever you choose to spend time looking at.
The medium works for me because it inherently raises questions. While at first sight it may feel grounded in certainty and knowing, the moment you place two disparate images next to each other, that certainty begins to peel away, leaving you to rest in a place of not knowing.
As for the issues you raised, those are things I think about, so it’s not surprising that they come out in the work.
Were there moments during the project when capturing the essence of a location or subject felt particularly challenging? How did you overcome these obstacles?
Most of the time spent on any project is just figuring things out, often challenged by the place or access to a location. There are days, even weeks, when I have no idea what I’m doing or where the work is going. That uncertainty can be frustrating, but it’s also a necessary part of the process. There’s no special trick to overcoming it—it’s about trusting that the confusion and wandering will eventually lead somewhere.
Were there particular image pairings in Orange Blossom Trail that revealed unexpected insights or added new layers to the narrative?
On the simplest level, you can see the interplay between the vertical color images and the horizontal black-and-white photographs as two projects colliding. The color images for me function in a more subjective and declarative way, carrying a sense of urgency or assertion, while the black-and-whites seem to rest more comfortably in what is simply there—perhaps an acceptance of the space.
The relationship between these two modes of seeing became essential to the book because it mirrors my own journey of navigating the trail. There were mornings when I woke up feeling an overwhelming need to explore something urgent and pressing about the place, only to find myself, moments later, drawn into a quieter sense of letting go, a recognition of the trail as it is, without the need for intervention or commentary. It’s in the space between these two approaches—the collision of assertion and acceptance—that unexpected layers of truth emerged, reflecting the trail’s complexity and my own evolving relationship to it.
Your images often feel meditative and deliberate. What role do light and composition play in creating this atmosphere, and what tips would you give photographers for achieving similar effects?
Yes, I think my images are both meditative and deliberate. Meditative in the sense that they are grounded in focused attention on the present moment, and deliberate in that there is effort to make that happen. When I’m shooting, I wake up early and work all day into the evening, regardless of anything else.
Light, of course, is everything in photography. I follow the light—it’s one of the things that brought me back to the Orange Blossom Trail. In New York, winters are cold, and the light is often flat. Down south, the light feels alive. I wake up and plan my day around where the sun will be.
As far as tips for achieving similar effects, I think it’s just about following where the light goes and letting it guide you.
What do you hope viewers take away from your photographs in *Orange Blossom Trail*, and how do you craft images to leave a lasting impression?
I think the work can conjure up feelings of empathy. It’s easy to look at the images and feel for the people doing backbreaking work in the extreme heat or the day laborers working in the groves—cultivating that initial sense of empathy doesn’t require much effort. However, I don’t put much stock in empathy alone unless it can transform into something meaningful.
I’d like viewers to reflect on the larger context and think about how these stories connect to the world we all share. Maybe the work encourages them to engage a little differently or think about things in a new way. It’s less about providing answers and more about creating space for those reflections to happen.
For photographers aspiring to explore socio-political or conceptual themes, what advice would you share based on your experiences with this project?
Stay too long wherever you go.
To discover more about this intriguing body of work and how you can acquire your own copy, you can find and purchase the book here. (Image Text Ithaca, Amazon)
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