Journal
The most expensive thing I have ever photographed
Platinum. Seventy carats of flawless diamonds. An edition of three. Valued at one point eight million dollars. And it is a vibrator.
The Pearl Royale was made by Colin Burn, a jewellery artist I have worked alongside for years, and photographing it was the strangest technical problem I have been handed. Not because of what it is — because of what it is made of. Platinum and brilliant-cut diamonds are two of the least forgiving surfaces you can put in front of a lens. Every light in the room ends up in the picture whether you invited it or not.
The question the object is actually asking
Colin's argument is the interesting part, and it is not about the diamonds.
“From my observations it seems society could not reconcile such a luxurious item for the act of sex. I was of the mindset: if we accept genuine luxury into other aspects of our lives, then why not the sexual experience?”
That lands harder the longer you sit with it. We have no difficulty at all accepting extraordinary craft in a watch, a car, a violin, a wedding ring. Objects made for eating and drinking and telling the time get platinum and stones and generations of workmanship, and nobody blinks. Point the same materials and the same skill at pleasure and people become visibly uncomfortable.
He wanted something that could sit beside the crown jewels and hold its own. Fit for a king or a queen — and the phrasing is deliberate, because the discomfort is not really about money. It is about what we have decided is worth dignifying.
Why I photographed it the way I did
The temptation with an object like this is to shoot it as a product: seamless white, hard specular highlights, every facet screaming. That would have been accurate and completely wrong. Product photography tells you what a thing costs. It cannot tell you what a thing means.
So it was lit as a sculpture and framed as an altar — because that is what Colin built. Not a luxury good but an object of veneration, arguing that the erotic deserves the same reverence we hand out freely to religion, to power and to money.
It sat in Treasure The Erotic alongside work that was making the same case in different materials: needle art, taxidermy, rope, glass. The exhibition ran in Perth and Los Angeles, took two Honourable Mentions at the International Photography Awards in 2019, and Penthouse ran twelve pages on it.
What the reaction told me
People will happily discuss the carat weight. They will discuss the workmanship, the platinum, the edition of three, the valuation. What they step around is what it is for.
Which is, in the end, the whole point of the piece. An object that expensive forces the conversation into the open, because you cannot dismiss it as tasteless and you cannot dismiss it as cheap. It has removed both of the usual exits.