A Photo Story: Into the Cold
Every New Year's Day they come back. André Saint Louis has been there to catch the moment they surface.
Every New Year's Day, without fail, they come back.
It does not matter how cold the lake is. It does not matter if the beach is frozen solid or if ice crystals are washing up along the shore. By noon on January 1st, thousands of people in Milwaukee will have stripped down to their swimwear, walked across Bradford Beach, and thrown themselves into Lake Michigan. Some of them have been doing it for thirty years. Some of them will do it for thirty more.
André Saint Louis has been watching this happen for most of his adult life.
For thirteen consecutive years he was one of the people running in. He would set multiple alarms, or simply not sleep at all, to make sure he made it to the lake by noon. The ritual only broke in 2012, the year he got married on New Year's Eve. Convincing a new wife to spend the first morning of their marriage freezing alongside strangers in a lake was not a conversation he won. After a brief hiatus, and then a pandemic that made every ordinary thing feel precious, he found himself drawn back to Bradford Beach. This time with a camera.
For the last four years André Saint Louis has been documenting the Polar Bear Plunge. Not participating. Watching. And the longer he watches, the more he sees.
Bradford Beach in January is not the Bradford Beach of summer. The sand is hard and grey. The water is the color of slate. The sky offers nothing. It is a landscape stripped of everything comfortable, which makes it, in André's view, the perfect subject for black and white photography.
"If a photograph is going to be in color, the color needs to truly sing," he says. "More often than not, when these images are in color they end up looking like a kaleidoscope of random tones and hues. By stripping away those bursts of color, I'm able to focus more on the textures of the scene and the expressions of the moment."
The expressions are everything. The anticipation on a face moments before the jump. The brief, almost peaceful second of suspension in the air. And then the surface. The moment someone comes up from a full submersion in Lake Michigan in the middle of winter is not a subtle thing. It is shock and awakening at the same time, written plainly across every feature.
That moment is what André has been chasing for four years. Not the spectacle of the crowd or the pageantry of the event, but that single, unrepeatable instant when the cold takes over and the face cannot lie.
To get it he has had to go into the water himself. For the past two years he has been shooting from inside Lake Michigan, standing in waders while the crowd surges around him, waiting. It is harder than it sounds. The plunge happens all at once, thousands of people rushing in like what André describes, with some affection, as a pack of joyful psychopaths. Being in exactly the right place at the right moment in that kind of chaos requires patience, positioning, and a willingness to watch someone walk to their knees and turn back more times than you can count.
He has not taken the photograph yet. The one that fully captures what New Year's Day at Bradford Beach means to him. He calls it the unicorn shot and he is still chasing it.
The event itself has been a Milwaukee tradition for well over a century. There are participants who have jumped in thirty times or more, who have brought their children and watched them bring their own. It is one of those rare civic rituals that has survived long enough to become genuinely meaningful, a collective act of discomfort that somehow functions as a reset, a shared acknowledgment that another year has begun and that the cold, at least, is honest.
André is drawn to the characters on the edges of that ritual. The wild ones. The animated ones. The ones who bring a particular energy to the morning. Over four years he has accumulated a growing archive of faces and moments, each year adding new layers to a project that is still finding its shape. He is thinking about a zine. Eventually a book.
For now he keeps going back. Every New Year's Day. Camera in hand. Standing in a frozen lake, waiting for the shot he has not taken yet.
"At the end of the day," he says, "I'm really just trying to refine my craft, have some fun, and keep chasing unicorns."
You can check out more of Andres work on foto @saintstheday or on hiswebsite www.andresaintlouis.org/
André Saint Louis is an independent artist and designer based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Working under the name Saint Louis Studios, he specializes in custom furniture and fixtures, commissioned sculptures, pop art paintings, and street photography. His photography documents events, experiences, and people with a journalistic eye. You can see more of his work at andresaintlouis.org.
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