Cut Gems

Asha Schechter documents the experience of retouching precious gems, in an essay from LARB Quarterly no. 47: ‘Security.’

By Asha SchechterFebruary 14, 2026

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• Memoir & Essay

This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 47: Security. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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IN JANUARY 2020, I was brought on to a project at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. They were updating the Allison and Roberto Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals and, as part of this process, rephotographing everything in the gem collection. The exhibition design would feature digital screens with images of the gems, many smaller than a dime, allowing visitors to tap the gems on screens to see details invisible to the naked eye, pinching to zoom in the manner to which we have become accustomed. My friend Cassandra Jenkins had been retouching these new photos of the gems for nine months when she reached out to ask if I’d be available to work on the project. She could only do it for 20 hours a week, she said, because she also worked as a musician and because retouching images of gems was so tedious that your eyes could only handle concentrating that closely on the screen for so long. There were 6,000 images of gems, she explained, photographed from various angles, and they had many more to retouch, with the reopening scheduled for the end of the year. We had worked together years earlier, in the photo department at The New Yorker, but I was now making art and adjuncting as a photography instructor at a few colleges, and Cassandra was working on her second solo album. Both of us needed these kinds of gig jobs to supplement our income.

Before I was hired, I had to audition. I was given five gems to retouch and some guidance from Cassandra:

A brief note on getting started: a big part of this retouching process is choosing which parts of each image need retouching, and how far to go with the retouching. I always try to strike a balance of expediting the process and retaining the integrity of the gems. Examples of common problems include: reflections of catalog numbers, rulers, or lighting sources; dents, dust, and scratches; reflections of the mount (sometimes paper, foam core, etc.). Occasionally there are white balance adjustments and each gem is unique.

The gems had been photographed in-house by the museum’s photography department with a Canon EOS 80D DSLR—a decent digital camera, but inferior to the medium-format models becoming common at the time. They were photographed on a paper background next to a ruler, or sometimes between two pen caps and the lens cap. It was never clear to me why the various caps were there; perhaps the paper was curling, or maybe they were easier to focus on than a gem, or they made for a consistent indicator of scale, like the way people photograph objects next to a Coke can on eBay. For my audition, I retouched five gems: three tourmalines (5, 11, and 57 minutes, respectively), one beryl (29 minutes), and one quartz (62 minutes).

What we did was only the first step toward perfecting the images. I was told never to sharpen anything, as sharpening, color correction, and silhouetting would be executed by another team. We were meant to focus exclusively on removing dust, scratches, and man-made marks from the gems’ surfaces, smoothing out damaged edges. We had a lot of latitude in deciding what was acceptable and what was an aberration, especially without having the actual object to refer to. We were given folders of images of gems with names like Beryl, Birthstones, Fluorite, Jewelry & Adornment, Ornamental and Opaque, Organic and Opal, Rare and Unusual, and Synthetics. Some of these categories are scientific classifications and some are cultural, or based on the museum’s organizational approach to display. To an untrained eye like mine, the gems were mostly defined by associations: this garnet looks like a Jolly Rancher, sapphire is my birthstone, this one was carved into the shape of a camel, and so on. You don’t really have to know what a garnet typically looks like to refine it for digital display.

I was given access to a Dropbox folder and assigned a group of images to work on each week or so. Once I got the hang of it, I would spend an average of 10–15 minutes on each gem, fitting in 8–10 hours a week between teaching and working in my studio. It was a strange, atomized kind of labor: sitting in Los Angeles, receiving folders of freshly photographed gems from a museum in New York staffed by (very friendly) people I would probably never meet. My classes shifted to Zoom in March when COVID-19 hit, and when school ended in June, I was logging 20 hours a week retouching gems on one screen while rewatching True Blood in the background.

In documenting gems for posterity, one encounters classic photography problems, the kind I would discuss with students in my history of photography class. What is an objective way of seeing? How do you understand a 3D object through an image, or multiple images? In my communication with Cassandra, the art director, and the in-house photographer, there was much discussion of “the window,” the flat transparent center of a gem that showed the paper beneath it. This area is undistorted by the facets cut into the gemstone, which produce internal reflections of light known as “brilliance,” strong and colorful dispersion referred to as “fire,” and brightly colored flashes of reflected light called “scintillation.” Photographing the window is like photographing smoke or a raindrop: while the facets reflect light, and the gem in its entirety makes visual sense because of the relationship between the angled cuts and the flat center, the window can only be looked through. The physical circumstances of the documentation become embedded in the image. Before I was brought on, the gems were being photographed on textured foam, which was causing huge problems in the window. The pen caps and rulers are cropped out, but the material on which the gem sits when photographed is forever present, tinting the window.

This was a mode of photography I had never really worked in—the photograph as a scientific tool, as data, as presumed fact. These final images are meant to function for visitors as a kind of microscope, a way for human eyes to perceive the depths of color, light, and eternity these gems contain but which are not visible by squinting into a display case. In digitally correcting lens aberration, physical damage, lighting effects, and white balance, however, these images become something else—an idealized photographic stand-in for the object, one that will potentially outlive and supplant the physical thing. One blue-green tourmaline I worked on was chewed up the side, missing small chunks from its upper edges. I did a cursory cleanup but left those chunks untouched. In the final image, that edge had been smoothed out, digitally restored. Treated in this way, the photographs begin to function editorially rather than scientifically. They start to resemble hyperreal food photography, or one of those “exposés” on retouching bodies in an unrealistic manner. The retouched image is a fantasy version, an idealized form that no longer represents a specific gem but an entire group, a perfect example of its type. It shifts from being a portrait of an individual specimen to a stock image.

While the primary function of these photographs is enhancing visitor experience at the museum, they also serve a secondary role as the photographic archive of the collection. That is, each of the photos is both a public-facing projection and definitive documentation. It’s hard to imagine that the museum will endeavor to rephotograph the entire gem collection with a better camera anytime in the near future. Perhaps when 3D scanning technology improves, there will be an impetus to reproduce them that way, but for now, this is the archive. For the purposes of documentation and preservation and to aid research, collections management, and education, many museums began photographing their collections in the early 20th century. This became standard practice by the middle of the century. Even a retouched high-resolution color photograph is still a more accurate reproduction than the dingy black-and-white photographs that comprise most 20th-century museum photo archives. (Curiously, MoMA was documenting exhibitions in black and white well into the 1990s.) But alterations do take place, and the image is not the thing itself. That the photographic records of the Museum of Natural History’s gem collection are “cleaned up” betrays the gap between object and image that photography is always navigating.

These photos are not, in other words, the perfect records Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote about in 1859, 20 years after the invention of photography, in an essay in The Atlantic Monthly on stereoscopy:

Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it.

 For Holmes, the photograph was a mirror of reality, so precise in its verisimilitude that one could destroy the referent and nothing would be lost. “Every conceivable object of Nature and Art,” he predicted, “will soon scale off its surface for us. […] The consequence of this will soon be such an enormous collection of forms that they will have to be classified and arranged in vast libraries, as books are now.” In his 1986 article, “The Body and the Archive,” Allan Sekula describes a Henry Fox Talbot photograph of a shelf of china:

Talbot speculates that “should a thief afterwards purloin the treasures—if the mute testimony of the picture were to be produced against him in court—it would certainly be evidence of a novel kind.” Talbot lays claim to a new legalistic truth, the truth of an indexical rather than textual inventory. Although this frontal arrangement of objects had its precedents in scientific and technical illustration, a claim is being made here that would not have been made for a drawing or a descriptive list. Only the photograph could begin to claim the legal status of a visual document of ownership.

One imagines a heist at the hall of gems: a masked burglar filling little velvet bags with the treasures of the collection. All that would remain would be a Dropbox of 25 MB photographs digitally scraped of their specificities. (“Your honor, that picture couldn’t possibly be the emerald found on my client: it doesn’t show a big scratch.”) Although photographs began to serve as evidence in court shortly after the invention of the medium, doubt in the veracity of these images plagued them from the start. In Tome v. Parkersburg Branch Railroad Company, an 1873 case in which photographic enlargements of possibly forged signatures were introduced as evidence, the court expressed skepticism about the photograph’s ability to accurately represent reality:

Photographers do not always produce exact fac-similes of the objects delineated, and however indebted we may be to that beautiful science for much that is useful as well as ornamental, it is at last a mimetic art, which furnishes only secondary impressions of the original, that vary according to the lights or shadows which prevail whilst being taken.

Eighty-six years after Holmes formed his idea of the perfect copy, André Bazin, in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (tr. Hugh Gray, 1960) demonstrated an almost religious belief in the photograph’s ability to absorb a piece of reality:

Only a photographic lens can give us the kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it something more than a mere approximation, a kind of decal or transfer. The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking, in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction.

For Bazin, the imprint of reflected light an object makes on film is the fundamental nature of the photographic image. His is not the perfect replica Holmes imagines, but a new picture haunted by its encounter with the thing it depicts, even when that depiction falls well short or diverges from our perception of reality. The twinkling gem photos would have delighted Bazin, as they fulfill his idea of “the creation of an ideal world in the likeness of the real, with its own temporal destiny.” In his framework, the images can happily outlast the gems themselves.

When I began retouching gems, I had, for four years, been making artworks with digital 3D modeling output as 2D prints on adhesive vinyl. Initially I had used stock models, but at this point I turned toward making replicas of real objects. I was working on images of garbage, and the most common garbage in my studio then consisted of pamplemousse LaCroix cans. I sent a 3D modeler images of a crumpled can, from which he built a wireframe replica in Autodesk 3ds Max. I painstakingly recreated the LaCroix can graphics in Photoshop to use as a “digital skin.” He then “wrapped” this skin around the 3D model, placed it into a virtual environment, and output high-resolution 2D images from a variety of angles. This work, which initially in my mind was specific, referring to that particular can, was understandably perceived as generic, and people who encountered it in Los Angeles read it as a satire of burgeoning beverage trends. That particular can was subsumed into a generic representation of a type.

I continued making this kind of work with objects I owned that exhibited evidence of use: a clock brought from Shanghai by a friend, which a fly had died inside of; my smudged Berkey water filter; a bag of peppercorns gifted by an ex; a dustpan full of my cat’s fur. These works form a nebulous archive—they aren’t photographs but they refer to real things, and their hyper-articulated surfaces and exaggerated scale produce such heightened detail that they exceed their referents in legibility and presence. Through their excess they depict the change that occurs in the translation of object to image.

Scale is, of course, central to our fascination with gems: they are tiny and mesmerizing and sometimes very valuable. People have imagined vastly enlarging gems or penetrating their dense interiors long before the Museum of Natural History even considered undertaking this project. In George Sand’s Laura: A Journey into the Crystal (1864; tr. Sue Dyson, 2004), a lovestruck young man has hallucinatory visions of entering a gem, where he discovers a fantastical landscape:

I was with Laura in the centre of the amethyst geode which graced the glass case in the mineralogical gallery; but what up to then I had taken blindly and on the faith of others for a block of hollow flint, the size of a melon cut in half and lined inside with prismatic crystals of irregular size and groupings, was in reality a ring of tall mountains enclosing an immense basin filled with steep hills bristling with needles of violet quartz, the smallest of which might have exceeded the dome of St Peter’s in Rome both in volume and in height.

Later in the novel, Laura’s eccentric uncle tells the protagonist, “Crystal […] is not what the common person thinks; it is a mysterious mirror which, at a given moment, received the imprint and reflected the image of a great spectacle. This spectacle was that of the vitrification of our planet.” Inside each crystal is a physical world and a temporal one. This is scientifically confirmed by a plaque at the Museum of Natural History that states, “We are now recording: Garnets can engulf other minerals as inclusions, which become a kind of time capsule. They can also have compositional zoning, where the core and exterior have different chemical compositions, showing how conditions changed over time.” The gem contains an indexical imprint of the past just as the photograph does, an almost literal example of the process Bazin imagined. The gems in Laura, written shortly after the invention of the daguerreotype, contain microscopic worlds the way those photographs did. Art conservator Ralph Wiegandt (as paraphrased by science reporter Stephen Ornes) explains that “well-made daguerreotypes can be enlarged 20–30 times and still reveal minute details of their subjects—a resolution that, today, would require a 140,000-megapixel digital camera,” dwarfing the 24.2-megapixel sensor on the camera used for the museum’s gem photographs.

Camera lenses themselves are sometimes made with fluorite or other crystals (incidentally, we retouched 130 images of fluorite). Fluorite reduces chromatic aberration in the photograph, a subtle fringing of color often discussed on forums about telephoto lenses, maybe illustrated with a crop of a bird’s wing showing a subtle hue on the edge. It bends light back into shape, reducing these halos better than glass does. In their natural state, fluorite crystals are never large enough to make a camera lens, so in the 1960s, Canon developed a synthetic version that could be shaped to the appropriate dimensions and was free of the impurities that give fluorite a green or purple tint. Drained of its own color, the synthetic version reduces aberrant color in the images it helps produce. A gem created not to be looked at, but looked through.

A journey into the interior of a gem is depicted almost literally in The Invisible Photograph: Part 1 (Underground), a 2014 documentary short produced by Arthur Ou and Tina Kukielski as part of a Carnegie Museum of Art initiative. It takes the viewer into Iron Mountain National Underground Storage Facility, a repurposed limestone mine in Pennsylvania that houses the 11 million photographs in the Bettmann Archive (owned by Corbis, Bill Gates’s stock photography company, at the time of filming). Unlike a museum photo archive, Bettmann is commercial in nature; rather than documenting a discrete collection, it amasses pictures of everything, licensing them for a fee. The interior walls are craggy white limestone: it looks like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, the Snow White ride at Disneyland, or the inside of a gem. Part 1 (Underground) tells the story of Otto Bettmann fleeing Nazi Germany with a few crates of pictures and starting the photography archive in the United States that eventually moved to this facility, constructed for ideal storage conditions. Employees celebrate the virtues of the “capture form,” the way negatives preserve the world with a kind of purity, unaltered by printing techniques. Bethany Boarts, the digital imaging coordinator at Iron Mountain, presciently predicts a return to the use of film. Showing this video to my photography classes through the 2010s, I would scoff at this, but Boarts was proven right by a Zoomer fascination with analog photography. (The woman at Bleeker Digital, where I process my film, tells me that most of the twentysomethings never actually pick up their negatives, only needing scans large enough to post. The store’s dumpster must be a special archive.)

In January 2016, Corbis announced that it had sold its image licensing businesses to Unity Glory International, an affiliate of Visual China Group. VCG, in turn, licensed the image collection to Corbis’s historic rival, Getty Images. Despite this change in ownership, the archive has stayed put. The mine does not just house a historical record; it is also a temple to the photograph as an object, containing shelf after shelf of negatives, transparencies, and prints. In the documentary, archivist Henry Wilhelm admits that he had fears about Gates’s purchase of the archive: “Bill Gates is the ultimate digital guy […] he’s gonna digitize the whole collection and throw away the originals and it’s over”—a 21st-century Oliver Wendell Holmes. But in doing the opposite, Gates demonstrated a belief in the auratic nature of the original material—a Bazin-like mindset—and the potential instability of the digital. Wilhelm, a charming character who maintains a website with a downloadable 3,213-page PDF on the archival quality of photographic materials, explains that, in his youth, he volunteered with the Peace Corps in the Bolivian rainforest, which was “like an accelerated aging chamber for photographs.” The mine, on the other hand, is kept at an ideal temperature, in which the collection degrades 500 times slower than in its previous home in Manhattan.

The archival impulse mixes the desire to live forever with the tragic recognition that all the careful preservation at best merely slows down inevitable decay; everything returns to dust. Probably the same inspiration lies behind the services offered by a company like EverDear. For as little as $995, you can make the ashes of a loved one (human or pet) into a diamond, transforming their body into what the company calls “the Ultimate Expression of Love.”

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All images © American Museum of Natural History, New York.