The Money Islands

In photojournalism, there are two kinds of pictures. One delivers the news with shocking precision: The image of a drowned Syrian child washed up on a beach in Turkey; the spectacular, eerie stillness of a protester about to be arrested in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We see an emergency depicted and are moved by it—compelled, in some cases, into action—and are left wondering, perhaps, about the toll the picture takes on the person behind the camera. 

The other kind of journalistic photograph is subtler in its messaging. Its power and its message accrue with time, metabolizing toward the surface. The truth is told but told slant, often aiming for the same result: a call to action, if not at least confronting a difficult choice. 

A land-reclamation project to accommodate growing infrastructure on the island of Felivaru.

These photographs by Mathias Depardon belong to the latter, subtler category. In 2022, he embarked on a global project to draw attention to sand as a finite human resource, traveling to Greenland, Florida, Cape Verde, India, and, in this case, the Maldives. In this set, persistent among the buildings, excavators, dredging pipes, and swimmers, is the ocean—unsurprising for a country with nearly 1,200 islands, and where 98 percent of the territory is water. The pictures, arresting in their composition and palette, owe much to how Depardon works, a slow journalism that refuses to take a place at its face value. The colors in the photographs are vibrant in their blue-toned mix; but when the pictures show mounds of sand, a kind of monochromatic utilitarianism is indicated.

Sand is, of course, so omnipresent in the world that very little can be said of its beauty. Unlike the sea or sky, the range of its hues errs toward darker, duller tones. What we know of sand is mostly functional—a surface to walk on, a material extracted for construction. Even at the most exotic beaches, it serves as frame or foil for the more photogenic sea. 

To capture the story of the overextraction of sand, some of Depardon’s images show movement, the whirls and twists of bodies or machines. The most sublime of these images portray divers cutting through a translucent ocean to dredge their bounty, one held breath at a time. 

Maldives is a small country, its islands totalling a little more than one hundred square miles. It is also the lowest-lying country on Earth—and getting lower. The more sand dredged from it, the likelier it is to become uninhabitable. Given the vicious combination of human pressure on the islands’ natural resources, population growth, and an exploding tourist industry, some scientists estimate the country will cease to exist by the end of this century. Speaking generally about his reporting—a sentiment that seems particularly prescient in relation to Maldives—Depardon said to me, “We may be the last few generations to see what a sand beach looks like.”

A Global Sand Observatory Initiative led by the United Nations Environment Programme estimates that sand resources—a term that includes sand, gravel, and crushed rock—are the most exploited natural resources after water. Roughly fifty billion metric tons of sand are extracted per year, which translates to an average of about forty pounds per human per day. According to the UN, the construction industry uses enough sand resources per year to build a wall twenty-seven meters high by twenty-seven meters thick around the equator. 

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Dredging pipes close-up on beach.

However, not all sand can be used in concrete. Due to salt’s corrosive properties, marine sand, like that extracted in the Maldives, can’t be used without an extensive and costly washing process. Instead, marine sand is primarily extracted for land reclamation—used for everything from fortifying eroded beaches to manufacturing new islands. Despite its abundance, desert sand is limited by its wind-weathered grains, which are too small and too smooth for reclamation or construction. As a result, freshwater sand found in riverbeds, lakes, and quarries makes up most of the sand used in construction. 

The sand-value chain—a network that includes sand divers, who in the Maldives earn a fraction of the $10 per ton price, and sand mafias worth $2 billion in India alone—is extensive and scarcely regulated. In India, the world’s second-largest sand-mining country, overextraction of sand is destroying freshwater riverbeds across the country. While public outcry did result in sand-mining bans in 2017, they were limited in scope and expired after only five years. 

For the Maldives, the solution is not as simple as halting the extraction of sand. Its growing population requires compact apartment buildings, which in turn necessitates the reclamation of hundreds of hectares of land. The largest ongoing reclamation project in the Maldives is the creation of Hulhumalé, an artificial island that was built by filling a lagoon with millions of cubic meters of extracted marine sand. The island, now the fourth largest in the Maldives, is expected to accommodate nearly two hundred fifty thousand inhabitants. Put starkly, by satisfying the immediate needs of growth, the Maldives might very well be accelerating its own extinction.

This catastrophe isn’t immediately apparent in Depardon’s pictures, because it isn’t a catastrophe that can be truly seen until it’s too late. Evident, nevertheless, is the scale of the reclamation project of Hulhumalé. The photographs of the new settlement show rows of high-rises behind piles of sand. It is in these pictures that the urgency of Depardon’s project emerges, revealing a progression from natural resource to finished structure, as if to remind future generations of what led to the island’s submergence. 

Workers on the island of Fulhadhoo.

Sand miners in Meemu Atoll.

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Bleached coral recovered during sand dredging.

Dredge pipe for an airport runway project on Muli island.

Newly reclaimed area on the island of Thilafushi, first established to help address the problem of excess waste in Malé, the capital city of Maldives. The increase in visitors has led to an almost unmanageable amount of garbage.

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A sand-brick maker on the island of Maafushi.

The Hiya project on the artificial island of Hulhumalé.

Tetrapods and dikes have been positioned offshore to protect the artificial beach near the King Salman Mosque in Malé.

Ahmed Aiham, a local environmental activist, walks over a dike of geotextile bags protecting a land-reclamation project on the island of Fulhadhoo.