Adjacent to a large ship repair yard in Dhaka, Bangladesh are a series of narrow streets and alleyways. These alleys contain the dozens of small shops that repair, fabricate and sell the various pieces of nautical equipment needed to outfit a large commercial ship. Among the machine shops, storefronts and welding shops, one long alley contains foundries where iron is melted and poured into sand casts to form the ships’ propellers.

This series of photographs show the foundry workers, both adults and children, toiling to create the propellers that will push the ships around the world. Mostly barefoot and without gloves, safety glasses or respiratory protection, they do the hot, dangerous work of creating a critical piece of equipment that, once installed and put to work, will be ignored and unseen. Like their lives, the propellers they make will just keep turning, pushing forward, seemingly without end - until eventually too old and broken to continue.