The magic of a gemstone isn’t just in its color or its cut, but in the hidden worlds it carries inside it. When you work with stones every day, you get glimpses—tiny flashes of light, the suggestion of a fracture, the whisper of something ancient. But seeing those inner landscapes fully is another art entirely, and no one reveals them quite like Danny J. Sanchez. I’ve admired Danny’s images for years—not just for their beauty, but for the way they shift your sense of scale and deepen your appreciation for the materials we both love. I'm so excited to be able to hang his work in my gallery and asked him to sit down with me for a conversation about his process, his inspirations, and the unseen worlds inside the stones we share a devotion to. Here’s our conversation:

You used to be a musician and then turned to the gem world and became a gemologist – have you always been interested in photography, as well? What drew you specifically to microphotography and how did you learn how to do it? It is so much more complicated than taking a single photo!

Yes!  My background is in music and contrary to what one might assume, I had no interest in photography whatsoever until I entered the world of gemology. After a career change, during my employment at the Gemological Institute of America, I fell deeply in love with the microscope, particularly spending time exploring gemstones and their inner landscapes. This was 2005 so offerings of other gemstone photomicrography were limited to niche gemological forums - and of course, the Photoatlas(es) of Inclusions in Gemstones. My hunger for these scenes and exploration thereof was insatiable and since there wasn't enough for me to consume, I needed to make my own.

There are so many fabulous inclusions in stones – how do you go about choosing a stone to photograph and then how do you pick a particular aspect of that stone to capture?
Because I don't pursue photographing inclusions as a scientific pursuit, documenting mineral associations, I have to choose stones for their aesthetic potential. This is different to choosing a stone because it has a particular inclusion. Certainly an inclusion can offer an amazing scene but I tend to reach more for a spatial capture rather than a central subject. This is why I lean into opals so heavily. And since I'm not choosing "a stone with an inclusion", rather a stone with the potential for a scene, it's very difficult to predict what's going to reveal itself once I get it home. (Especially considering I have to cut or recut a lot of the stones.) Generally speaking, out of five stones I'm lucky to get one photo.

Can one stone provide more than one image (if you use a different angle or lighting, for instance)?
Absolutely. And I do days, sometimes weeks, of exploration, lighting tests and test runs in order to find them. Once I've sat with a stone for all that time, I tend not to revisit them. There's a lot to be said about overworking a piece / knowing when something is finished. If I'm meant to find the photograph, I'll find it. If I'm not, I won't.

Do you have a favorite photograph of all time? Tell me why it’s your fav.
Voof. I’m very sentimental about my work and I have so many favorites. Many of them are favorites because they serve as reminders of a moment in time or markers of a breakthrough. Through that lens, I think the most important image is the Mountains in Quartz image. That was an image that solidified, to me, I wasn’t just getting lucky with my images. It really helped dispel the imposter syndrome or doubt I was feeling and proved that I could find the shot, compose it, and capture it exactly as I wanted.

Is there an area using photomicrography that you’d like to expand into or explore?
There are a lot of folks photographing insects, ferrofluid, or liquid crystals. All of it can be so creative and dynamic. But so far, nothing has interested me more than the inner worlds of gems and minerals.

When you saw my work, what were your first thoughts?
That we reach for a similar feeling in our work. Our media may be very different but we both create new things with the vistas that minerals provide us with. We both want the viewer to be transported with our work!

ABOUT DANNY:

Danny J. Sanchez is a Los Angeles-based gemologist and photomicrographer whose practice reveals the immensity folded into the infinitesimal. Mining the microstructure of gemstones, Sanchez employs custom optical apparatus, elaborate lighting systems, focus stacking, and near-geological patience to transmute mineral inclusions into images that oscillate between document and dream. His subjects are rendered as unknown terrains and astral expanses, collapsing the registers of the scientific and the sublime. His works destabilize our sense of scale: a microscopic fracture assumes the scope of a nebula, a color flash becomes an atmosphere. Sanchez's images, celebrated in publications and international competitions, resist simple categorization; they are at once empirical and ethereal, a reminder that wonder can be summoned from what is barely perceptible.