Jewels of the East

Farrukh Ahsan built Jewels of the East in 2013 on the idea that jewelry should connect, endure, and tell a story. Baltic amber worked in Gdańsk. Gemstones from Turkey. Forms carried down through Himalayan and Kashmiri workshops, making many of these pieces one of a kind. She never spelled it out in the brief, but it was obvious: the images had to carry the same weight the pieces do.

That's harder than it sounds, because most jewelry photography works to flattens the dimensionality that makes pieces like this matter.

We carried a heavy emphasis on Amber pieces, which can be genuinely tricky to shoot. You don't light the surface, you light through it.

Unlike Amber, Silver wants to mirror the whole room, and every stray reflection becomes a hot streak that look like flaws. Managing those reflections is most of the actual work, and you have to do it without cooling the frame down so far that the warmth you built into the amber drains right back out.

Farrukh's customers talk about their grandmothers jewlery, about heirlooms, about pieces that they remember from when they were kids. So the photography had to land in that register, warm and personal and a little nostalgic, without hiding the object behind a lot of styling.