I usually write about photography: cameras, film, and the way light shapes how we see the world. But when I first encountered the work of jewelry designer Margaret De Patta, I felt an immediate connection. Her pieces are more than adornments; they’re miniature sculptures of light and form. As a photographer, I couldn’t help but imagine her brooches and rings through my own lens, where geometry, translucence, and light converge much like in a carefully composed photograph. Over the past few years, I’ve found myself returning to her work again and again, reflecting on how it resonates with my own passion for capturing the incredible qualities of light.

Margaret De Patta: Jewelry in a Photographer’s Light

If you’ve never heard the name Margaret De Patta, you’re not alone. She isn’t as famous as Cartier or Tiffany, but her work belongs in the same conversation as modernist painters, sculptors, and even photographers. Born in 1903, she began her career as a painter before discovering jewelry, and quickly realized it could be something more than ornament. To her, a brooch or ring was wearable sculpture, a stage where geometry and light performed together.

Her education at the New Bauhaus in Chicago under László Moholy-Nagy profoundly shaped her vision. Instead of treating gemstones as mere sparkle, she worked with quartz and rock crystal, cutting them like tiny lenses that bent and refracted light. Imagine a gemstone behaving like a camera lens — magnifying, distorting, and revealing new perspectives. That was De Patta’s playground.

She wasn’t only an artist at the bench. In 1951, she co-founded the Metal Arts Guild of San Francisco, creating a community for jewelers and metalsmiths to share knowledge and elevate the craft. With her husband, industrial designer Eugene Bielawski, she also launched Designs Contemporary, a workshop that sought to bring modernist jewelry to everyday people. It was an ambitious dream — to make beauty and thoughtful design part of daily life.

Today, her work lives on in museums like the Smithsonian and the Oakland Museum of California. Her pieces shimmer not just because of their materials, but because of the ideas within them: that light itself can be a design material, that geometry can carry emotion, and that jewelry can be as thought-provoking as any photograph or painting.

Light as Material

For De Patta, light was never incidental — it was her subject. She often used rock crystal or rutilated quartz cut with windows and facets that bent light in surprising ways. As photographers, we know how glass transforms vision: a lens can sharpen, distort, scatter, or magnify. De Patta’s gemstones did the same, turning jewelry into instruments of perception.

In my own abstract photography, I sometimes use pieces of glass or gemstones at the macro level, exploring how color and light shape emotion. In those moments, I feel a kinship with her approach — both of us using small objects to explore something much larger.

Geometry and Composition

De Patta’s designs reflect the influence of Constructivism and the Bauhaus — clean lines, bold shapes, purposeful balance. Looking at her brooches, I see the same logic that guides photographic composition: weighing negative space, aligning angles, adjusting balance. A tiny shift of line or proportion changes everything, just as a photographer’s framing transforms what the viewer experiences.

Jewelry as Sculpture, Photography as Vision

De Patta famously called her work “wearable art.” To me, her jewelry is sculpture that moves with the body, alive in shifting light. That dynamism resonates deeply with photography. A photograph isn’t truly static either — while it freezes a moment, it still suggests energy, motion, and context. Her jewelry embodies that same tension between stillness and movement.

I often find that abstract art holds this duality too — simultaneously calm and in motion — which is one reason I’m drawn to making abstract photographs myself.

A Personal Reflection

I would have loved to photograph Margaret De Patta’s work — not just to document it, as shown here in screen captures, but to truly collaborate with it. Her pieces invite exploration, revealing new surprises from every angle. Photographing them would feel like a dialogue between her vision and mine, both grounded in the belief that light is essence, never mere decoration.

At the end of this article, I’ve included a few of my own abstract light and glass photographs. Abstract work isn’t everyone’s favorite, but I’ve always enjoyed it — in art and in photography alike — for the way it balances suggestion, emotion, and form across mediums.

Closing

Margaret De Patta’s work reminds us that art transcends medium. Whether in stone, silver, or through a camera lens, the pursuit is the same: to shape light, to form space, and to reveal something deeper. As a photographer, I see in her jewelry not just adornment, but the same pursuit that drives me every time I lift a camera — the endless dance of light and design.

For those interested in seeing more of Margaret’s work, I recommend the catalog Space Light Structure: The Jewelry of Margaret De Patta, published alongside exhibitions at the Oakland Museum of California (February–May 2012) and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York (June–September 2012).