Two days after returning home from the American Gem Society Conclave in New Orleans last week, I drove down the coast to Carlsbad, Calif., home to the Gemological Institute of America, to attend a cocktail event pegged to a new exhibition featuring 25 exceptional pieces of diamond jewelry on display through May 11.
I knew the exhibition had something to do with the U.S. debut of a new book about diamonds, but I was not prepared for the monster tome that greeted me when I arrived at GIA’s seaside campus. Dreams of Diamonds looks like it was taken from Brobdingnag, the fictional land of the giants in Gulliver’s Travels. It weighs 30 pounds, requires its own table to display, and costs $10,000. Not only is it the biggest coffee- table book I’ve ever seen, it’s officially the world’s largest book on diamonds. And one pricey copy—out of 500—now belongs to GIA.
Conceived in 2007 by the U.K.-based husband-and-wife photography duo Alastair Laidlaw and Christine Marsden, the book showcases the work of 12 of the world’s top jewelers, diamantaires, and designers—including Adler, Chatila, Chopard, Chow Tai Fook, Mouawad, Munnu the Gem Palace, Diacore, and Diarough—who loaned more than $500 million worth of diamonds to the three-year-shoot.
Diarough loaned this diamond sautoir, featuring 813 cts. of diamond crystals and 584 cts. t.w. polished diamonds, to the Dreams of Diamonds shoot.
Laidlaw and Marsden have spent the past two decades photographing jewelry, much of it for U.K.-based magazines, making them especially conscious of how difficult it can be to capture the beauty of a scintillating gemstone in a still image.
Robert Weldon, manager of photography and visual communications at GIA, said it best when he described the book as a “dreamscape.” Set against backdrops that verge on the surreal, the diamond jewels in the book look like cosmic treasures afloat in a Technicolor universe borrowed from Alice in Wonderland. The briolette, for example, is flanked by two transposed images of a single albino peacock. According to a funny anecdote recounted by Marsden, the notoriously testy bird forced the photographers to give chase one afternoon when they arrived to shoot it.
“It has to be said—the diamonds and jewels were by far the best behaved when it came to the photography,” Marsden said.
The exhibit isn’t on for long, but if you’re anywhere near Carlsbad over the next week, don’t miss it. My friend McKenzie Santimer, project manager of exhibit development at GIA, helped assemble the 25 standout jewels on display, some of which don’t appear in the book, which means this might be your only opportunity to see them—including this crazy pair of boots encrusted with 38,883 diamonds totaling 1,527 cts. from Diarough.
I suspect the same rationale applies to a $10,000 coffee-table book produced by two British photographers who devoted eight years to its creation. In other words, snap this baby up while supplies last—and prepare to be seduced by its fantastical depiction of the world’s finest diamonds.