Tainted Waters, now living at Fourth Floor

Tainted Waters

Water in Ghana carries more than itself. By the time it reaches the Korle Lagoon or the Pra River, it's carrying decades of what's been poured, dumped, and mined into it. Prince El-sha Martey spent time along those waters with a camera, and the result is Tainted Waters: Pollution, People, and Resilience, a series that's now found a home outside Agbawe, published as part of Fourth Floor's open call on water.

Tainted Waters explores what happens when the water people depend on turns against them. It moves through the rivers, lagoons, and shorelines of Ghana where pollution has settled into everyday life, tracing how contamination touches health, work, ritual, and the small rituals of play that don't stop just because the water has changed. We see how people, regardless of the pollution, find ways to adapt to the conditions of their environment. A few go further, fighting to restore the water bodies themselves. The series doesn't treat this as a distant crisis. It stays close to the people living beside these waters, showing the ways they've chosen to adapt without fanfare, and the intentional choice to keep living, and keep resisting, anyway.

The project sits with something we come back to often at Agbawe: the ordinary and the damaged aren't separate categories. The Korle Lagoon has been notorious since the 1990s. Upstream, in the mining basins around the Pra and Ankobra, galamsey has put mercury and arsenic into water that people still fish from, farm with, and wash in. Martey's images don't announce any of this. They sit inside it, following the daily choreography of people whose relationship to water hasn't stopped, even where the water has turned against them.

That's the part of the series we think matters most. It would have been easy to make a project about ruin. Instead it's a project about continuation, about the fisherman still working a river that's failing him, the child still playing where the shoreline used to be clean, the neighbors who plant mangroves and organize cleanups because waiting for someone else to fix it isn't an option. Resilience shows up less as a theme and more as a fact of how people live.

Fourth Floor's feature places the series alongside the wider context of what's happening to Ghana's waterways, and it's worth reading in full. It's also a good marker for where Prince's practice is heading. He's someone who documents Accra from the inside, in the neighborhoods and overlooked moments most people walk past, and Tainted Waters extends that same instinct outward, toward water and what it means when it stops being trustworthy.

You can read the full feature and see the series on Fourth Floor's site:

https://www.thefourthfloor.co.uk/arts/7nw0t01wa5e9fse938ly76k5pyeth9

And the accompanying post is up on their Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/p/DcMGbDviAYL/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsi=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==