Photos From ‘The End of the World’

There’s a place in Venice, La., that locals call “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 wanted 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 camera and snapped some photos of the landscape. At the same time, she brought a few empty jars to the riverbank and collected water samples.  

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

One night, under a full moon, Royale decided to submerge the Polaroid photos in 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 effects of the water vary, but the resulting prints are all equally striking. The photos became distorted, resembling abstract watercolor paintings with unique patterns and colors.  

Royale says her experiment was equal parts artistic intuition and scientific method. She had previously experimented with putting Polaroids in water but was curious to observe the effects of river water, which can contain pollutants and any number of other natural chemicals. “I kept the moon cycle as part of the process,” she says. “Thinking about it from a scientific perspective … time is the control,” while the water samples and photographs are the variables.  

Polaroids are typically developed using exposure to air. But introducing them to water affects their chemistry in a new way. “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 example, has a different chemical composition than water collected from the Mississippi River in Minnesota. These differences are reflected in the photographs’ distortions. 

Royale — who was born in New York City, raised in Atlanta and now splits her time between Chicago and New Orleans — used a similar process with Lake Michigan water. Her series Rituals of Belonging contains 120 Polaroids that have been submerged into 120 individual 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 versions of the altered Polaroids for exhibition. Four of the images from her Landscapes of Matter series are included in New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which runs through Jan. 17. Two of them will remain in the museum’s permanent collection.