The village that fell into a river: Sim Chi Yin's best photograph

'One woman heard tree branches snapping and jumped out of bed - just in time to see her mattress float away as the back half of her house melted into the darkness'I started my Shifting Sands series seven years ago to look at how the world is running out of usable sand. It's the next big resource crisis. I'm from Singapore, the world's biggest importer of sand per capita, due to the scale of its land reclamation. That was the starting point of what I had initially mapped out as a global project, investigating the extraction of and uses of sand, its consequences and alternatives.I photographed in Singapore, China, Malaysia and Vietnam. The Mekong Delta in Vietnam is experiencing rapid erosion due to large-scale sand mining and China damming the river upstream. I went to a number of villages with researchers. We went to the commune of Hiep Phuoc, southeast of Saigon, where this picture was made, just five days after a number of villagers - including tea-seller Nguyen Thi Hong, 45, who appears in this image - had lost their homes. Continue reading...