Images From ‘The End of the World’

There’s a spot in Venice, La., that locals name “The End of the World.”  

“It’s the last place you can access by car before the Mississippi River spills into the Gulf of Mexico,” explains Renee Royale. A conceptual artist, Royale ’25 MFA needed to see the place for herself. “Adjacent to the area there is a gravel road that extends farther, leading to an industrial plant,” she says. “And it’s like, ‘Oh, the irony. The End of the World ends in industry.’”  

She took out her Polaroid digital camera and snapped some photographs of the panorama. At the identical time, she introduced a couple of empty jars to the riverbank and picked up water samples.  

“I wanted the Earth to know someone was listening,” she says. 

One night time, beneath a full moon, Royale determined to submerge the Polaroid photographs within the river water. “I intuitively put them in jars,” she says. “I left them for a moon cycle and then just saw what changed.”  

The results of the water fluctuate, however the ensuing prints are all equally placing. The photographs grew to become distorted, resembling summary watercolor work with distinctive patterns and colours.  

Royale says her experiment was equal components creative instinct and scientific technique. She had beforehand experimented with placing Polaroids in water however was curious to watch the consequences of river water, which might include pollution and any variety of different pure chemical substances. “I kept the moon cycle as part of the process,” she says. “Thinking about it from a scientific perspective … time is the control,” whereas the water samples and images are the variables.  

Polaroids are usually developed utilizing publicity to air. But introducing them to water impacts their chemistry in a brand new method. “Different water bodies have different chemical makeups, both in terms of natural salinity and pH [a measure of acidity and alkalinity],” says Royale. The water she collected from the Mississippi River in Louisiana, for instance, has a distinct chemical composition than water collected from the Mississippi River in Minnesota. These variations are mirrored within the pictures’ distortions. 

Royale — who was born in New York City, raised in Atlanta and now splits her time between Chicago and New Orleans — used an analogous course of with Lake Michigan water. Her collection Rituals of Belonging comprises 120 Polaroids which were submerged into 120 particular person jars of lake water. “I went back to the same spot, the same bench, over a two-month period … taking photos of the lakeshore from the same exact spot,” says Royale. “I thought about myself as a fisherman and the Polaroids as fish.”  

Royale reproduces enlarged variations of the altered Polaroids for exhibition. Four of the photographs from her Landscapes of Matter collection are included in New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging on the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which runs by Jan. 17. Two of them will stay within the museum’s everlasting assortment.