Oliver Lenzen: Sand

Sand reflects almost all facets of nature. Sand was probably also the first material -encountered by marine organisms during their decisive first step toward land. Common only in the singular, sand is already a term for a multitude. About seventy of these are found in the preceding illustrations, completely detached from their context, i.e. removed from the sand as such. None of these individual particles is like the other. It is almost too absurd to imagine that there are probably no two completely identical grains of sand on earth. The discrepancy between the uniformity of the mass and the actual individuality of its components is particularly noteworthy when considering that, according to esti-mates, every single second on earth some 1 billion grains of sand are newly created by erosive processes.