Edge of Paradise

Artist: Steve Dozier

Exhibits open during Art Walk on the 1st Friday of every month. 6pm-10pm

Gallery hours Monday through Friday 10:00am – 5:00pm

Extended Gallery Hours most Fridays until 10pm

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Overview

For decades, South Florida has been a place where people arrive, reinvent themselves, struggle, disappear, and begin again.

This exhibition presents more than 150 photographs documenting the evolving human landscape of South Florida — from Haitian and Cuban migration during the dramatic boatlift era of early 1980s, to the transformation of parts from a fading retirement community into a global symbol of style, tourism, and excess.

Alongside these historic documentary images are striking contemporary color photographs of modern Florida life: scenes filled with heat, light, beauty, humor, and contradiction. Also included are deeply personal portraits reflecting the influence of classic documentary photography traditions.

Artist Statement

I have always photographed South Florida as a place in motion.

People arrive here carrying dreams, losses, histories, ambitions, and desperation. Entire neighborhoods transform. Cultures overlap and reinvent themselves. What appears glamorous on the surface often exists beside loneliness, struggle, displacement, or impermanence.

My work focuses on observing these changes over time — from Haitian and Cuban migration during the early 1980s and the transformation of Miami Beach, to the strange beauty and theatricality of contemporary Florida life. I have been equally drawn to documentable moments, intimate portraiture, and visually charged scenes that reveal something deeper beneath the surface.

Photography allows time to remain visible. Many of the people, streets, buildings, and atmospheres captured in these images no longer exist in the same form. Yet the emotional reality of those moments remains present.

This exhibition is both a documentary and a personal journey through a region that continually reinvents itself while leaving traces of every previous version behind.

Bio

Steve Dozier is an American photographer whose work documents the evolving cultural and human landscape of Florida across more than four decades. His photography combines documentary realism, portraiture, and contemporary color imagery to explore themes of migration, identity, reinvention, memory, and the contradictions of life within one of America’s most visually and socially dynamic regions.

Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dozier photographed major moments in South Florida’s history, including Haitian and Cuban migration and the boatlift era that reshaped Miami’s cultural identity. His work chronicles the dramatic transformation of Miami Beach — from its years as a quiet community of elderly Jewish retirees through periods of urban decline and crime, into an ultimately internationally recognized center of tourism, fashion, nightlife, and global culture.

Alongside his documentary work, Dozier has created vivid contemporary color photographs capturing the surreal atmosphere, tropical light, humor, beauty, and tension unique to modern Florida life—from North Florida, to St Petersburg and Fort Myers, to Miami and Dade County. His portraiture reflects a longstanding interest in human presence, character, and social observation rooted in the traditions of classic documentary photography.

Dozier had an active 50 year career in journalism and was a staff photographer for the Miami Herald, St. Petersburg Times, and other large newspapers. He was Assistant Managing Editor for The Detroit News, and Photographic editor for the Detroit Free Press, Fort Worth Star Telegram and the Miami Herald. His photographs have been published in multiple publications including Life and Newsweek.

Dozier has been an editor on five projects that have won the Pulitzer Prize, including one for Public Service.

 Dozier was journalism faculty at the University of Kentucky before becoming Lecturer and Photojournalism Program Director at the University of Georgia. Students from both programs have won top national collegiate photojournalism competitions.