THE TOPOGRAPHY OF TEARS

The Topography of Tears is a contemplative visual study of tears that I photographed through an optical standard light microscope mounted with a digital microscopy camera. I began this project in 2008 during a period of grief. In my abundant supply of tears, I became curious about the very nature of tears. What do tears actually look like? Would joy look like sorrow? A microscope provided the means to investigate my tears, and beyond that to visually evoke the unseen realm of my emotions.

Over a period of eight years, I photographed a wide range of my own tears, along with some from others young and old. (I also sampled tears when my eyes watered, as well as from chopping onions). I shed tears directly onto glass slides, either letting them evaporate, or compressing a tear between the slide and a thinner glass coverslip. The results of each approach look different, yet equally interesting to me. Air-dried tears reveal their organic structures, similar to natural structures at every scale in nature: patterns of erosion etched into earth over a million years can resemble the branched or crystalline forms in evaporated tears that took a moment to occur. Images produced by compressed tears often evoke a sense of place, like aerial views over a terrain of emotion.

Although tears are a composition of water, proteins, minerals, hormones, antibodies and enzymes, the topography of my tears revealed to me momentary landscapes, transient as the fingerprint of someone in a dream. For me this series is like an ephemeral atlas.

Each tear that I’ve photographed has its own visual character. Tears of grief or any other emotion can look very different from each other, even when they are shed in the same moment. And just like photographing a landscape, different areas of a tear examined under a microscope can vary from one region to another whether it was generated in the same moment or the same emotion in a different circumstance. I saw that even my own tears of grief and tears of joy could not be generalized or categorized by any particular visual pattern.

Many variables influence the visual diversity among these images: whether sampled tears is air-dried or compressed, the volume of tear fluid on a slide, chemical/biological variations, microscope and camera settings, and how I visually process and print a photomicrograph. Other variables are yet to be studied.

My original questions have led me inside to consider tears at an intangible level, and ponder their mystery. I’m still moved by what a tear image can evoke and invoke about the significance of a moment in a flash of insight glowing at the edge of articulated thought.

Tears are the medium of our most primal language in moments as unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger, and as complex as a rite of passage. They are the evidence of our inner life overflowing its boundaries, spilling over into consciousness. Wordless and spontaneous, they can release us to the possibility of realignment, reunion, catharsis, intractable resistance short-circuited, as in shedding an old skin; shedding tears, shedding light. The light shed through a tear that illuminates the poetry of life.

While my project began at the most personal level, the Topography of Tears came to be a contemplation on what connects us all in a most essential way - as though a microcosm of humanity permeates each tear, like one drop of an ocean.

© Rose-Lynn Fisher 2025
all rights reserved


contact:
roselynnfisher8@gmail.com

The Topography of Tears
Bellevue Literary Press, publisher

Gallery:
Craig Krull Gallery

Links to Selected Press
Online, Print & Blogs:

The Getty "What They Saw"

NPR

The Marginalian
(aka BrainPickings)

The New Yorker

Smithsonian Magazine

Harper's Magazine

Le Monde (France)

Tages-Anzeiger (Switzerland)

Agrifolio (Italy)

Artribune (Italy)

Gaceta (Colombia)

Dummy (Germany)

Zeit Wissen Magazine (Germany)

Die Welt (Germany)

Paris Match (France)

ArtSixMic (France)

Palais de Tokyo (France)

Madame Le Figaro (France)

Polka Magazine (France)

Laboratoire du Geste (France)

Art Critique (France)

The Culturist

Observatoire de L'Art Contemporain (France)

Revue Feuilleton (France)

Collaboration DARQUER LACE

Psychologie Heute (Germany)

Y-Mag (Germany)

Galileo TV (Germany)

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

CBC Arts (Canada)

LIFE Magazine China

B+W Photography (UK)

L.A.Weekly

Boston Globe

Healio Magazine

Barns Worth Burning

Trouw (NL)

De Telegraaf (NL)

Vogue (Spain)

Feature Shoot

Lenscratch

Wired

Amateur Photographer (UK)

Elizabeth Avedon Journal

GUP Magazine (NL)

Broadly

PRI / Studio 360

TiP - Balmond Studio (UK)

The Guardian (UK)

The Paris Review

The Outpost (Lebanon)

De Gids (Netherlands)

Esquire Russia

Yorokobu (Spain) 2

Yorokobu (Spain) 1

Lenscratch

British Cinematographer (UK)

In Vivo Magazine (Switzerland)

Galileo (Italy)

Design Observer

The Good Men Project

Juxtapoz

The Telegraph (UK)

Medical Daily

Happinez (NL)

Southwest the Magazine

Angelus

Big Think

The Swaddle (India)

Delo (Slovenia)

El Mundo (Spain)

Balthazare Magazine (France)

De Redactie (Belgium)

YLE News (Finland)

Garbo (Romania)

O Globo (Brazil)

Dazed

Popular Science blog

The Daily Meal

Times of Malta

PetaPixel

Refinery29

io9

Lifo (Greece)

ABC (Spain)

La Nacion (Argentina)

Kindred Subjects

John Culbert - Geometry of tears

THE TOPOGRAPHY OF TEARS

© Rose-Lynn Fisher 2008-2024  all rights reserved