Palm Beach is a place I’ve wanted to photograph for a long time.
There’s something fascinating about it. Immaculate green lawns sit alongside sandy beaches, pastel architecture lines the streets, classic cars somehow look completely at home, and everything seems beautifully considered.
For this new collection, I wanted to play with that world of perfection and luxury. Elegant women, perfectly groomed dogs, classic cars and unexpected moments, all set against the unmistakable backdrop of Palm Beach.
Some things go perfectly to plan. Others, not quite.
The Pursuit of Perfection
The idea of perfection became a recurring theme while creating the collection. Palm Beach is so beautifully maintained that I started thinking about what would happen if you pushed that pursuit of perfection just a little too far.
That idea became The Perfect Lawn.
A woman stands outside a beautiful Palm Beach home, vacuuming an already immaculate lawn. It’s ridiculous, of course, but somehow it doesn’t feel entirely impossible. If the grass is already perfect, why not make it more perfect?
A perfect lawn can still need vacuuming. A beautiful Rolls-Royce can still break down. A quiet round of golf can still be interrupted by an alligator.
That little bit of imperfection is what makes this scenes interesting to me.
And perhaps that is what I enjoyed most about creating the collection: taking a place so closely associated with perfection and allowing things to go just slightly wrong.
Creating My Own Palm Beach
The collection began with spending time in Palm Beach, photographing locations, architecture and details that caught my attention.
The colours were impossible to ignore. Soft pinks, deep greens, white facades, striped umbrellas and perfectly manicured landscapes all became part of the visual language of the series.
I also couldn’t leave out some of the details that make Palm Beach instantly recognisable. In The Duke, the iconic Worth Avenue clock tower becomes the backdrop for one of the collection’s more elegant moments: a woman behind the wheel of a classic car, with her Great Dane sitting beside her. It’s a quieter scene than some of the others, but one that captures the timeless glamour I associate with Palm Beach.
That mix became important to the collection. Not every photograph needed something to go wrong. Some could simply celebrate the place itself, its elegance, its eccentricity and that unmistakable Palm Beach way of life.
My work has always existed somewhere between photography and imagination. I photograph the locations and individual elements and then bring them together to construct a new scene. It allows me to take something familiar and push it slightly beyond reality.
Explore the collection:
Paul Fuentes | Palm Beach
From Palm Beach to Miami
This collection also marks an exciting moment for us. This December, we’ll make our debut at AQUA Art Miami during Miami Art Week, where we’ll present a curated selection of works alongside the new Palm Beach collection.
It feels like a fitting place to introduce the series in person. Palm Beach and Miami share that unmistakable South Florida character, bold architecture, tropical landscapes, colour, glamour and a certain sense of exces. All things that have found their way into this new body of work.
We’ll be exhibiting at AQUA Hotel, Room 109, from December 2–6, 2026, and I’m lookin
g forward to seeing these works leave the studio and come together on the walls for the first time.
