SAND is a largely invisible component at the centre of the world's growing urban regions. Indeed, mixed with gravels, cement and water, sand becomes the concrete foundation of the infrastructure we rely on to do almost anything. The social and ecological costs of extracting this material are huge and are slowly coming to global visibility. In 2019, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released their first ever extensive report on the ubiquitous material. This series formed part of my doctoral research on the extraction of sand in Accra, Ghana - a growing city in an expanding metropolitan region of West Africa. This series of images captures the labours, lives and livelihoods surrounding the extraction process in Accra, offering a deeply intimate engagement with a globally significant material.
