Art director Wim Delmée worked at Ogilvy & Mather in Amsterdam. He had to promote a cosmetics product for Pond's. It was a special jar. It contained a transparent gel, and inside that gel was a spiral of white cream. It was a small jar, about 5 centimeters high if you included the cap. But it did have something beautiful. This jar had to be depicted on posters of 70 x 100 cm.
Now it is difficult to show something that is actually so small on this scale. You magnify all the mistakes. Air bubbles and deformations in the glass that you don't even notice when you look at it normally, suddenly do in a photo. That is why these kinds of photos were often edited by a retoucher. He removed all the irregularities with pencil, brush and often also with airbrush. But a retoucher also cost money. Wim and I therefore thought it would be better to spend the money that was actually going to be used for the retoucher on a model maker: someone who is able to make a larger version of the same object. And then completely without glass defects. We found the model maker in Gerard Deibel.
Twee weken later belde hij me op om te zeggen dat ie klaar was en dat hij hem in mijn studio zou komen afleveren. Perfectie levert magie op. Toen hij het stuk uit de doos haalde moest ik het hem nageven: het was pure perfectie. Hij had een week lang zitten schuren aan het blok perspex, net zo lang dat het precies de juiste vorm van het potje had, inclusief de schroefdraad.
Two weeks later he called me to say it was ready and that he would come and deliver it to my studio. Perfection produces magic. When he took the piece out of the box I had to hand it to him: it was pure perfection. He had been sanding the block of perspex for a week, just long enough to make it exactly the right shape for the pot, including the screw thread. With increasingly finer sandpaper and then finishing it off by polishing the thing. When I put the thing in the light I had imagined it was immediately completely finished. For the final photo I first took a picture of the loose spiral against a dark blue background. I had this photo made as a large slide of 60x65 centimeters. That slide was used as the background for taking the final photo. That photo is shown on this page.
Gerard was a bit of an odd man. He lived in a small house in a remote spot in the middle of the Beemster. He often made objects for photographers. I knew him through my internship with Hans Kroeskamp, at that time the undisputed king of still life photography. Deibel had made the sets for the campaign "Vaak is rond beter. Soms vaste" (Often round is better. Sometimes square) by Bokma for him. He had also made the sandwich that was depicted on all of De Ruijter's packaging from plastic. His set pieces were always perfect. I asked him if he could make a copy of the jar in question with a height of 25 centimetres. He said that it was no problem at all but that it would take some time. Four weeks later I went to see him. I found him in his messy little house where he knew where to find everything himself. In the middle of the room was a workbench with a rough piece of perspex on it. He's already in there! I just have to take him out. Followed by a roaring laugh. To add: 'Just you watch boy, he'll be perfect'.
