Tears of laughter
Los Angeles-based fine art photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher has collected, dried and photographed over 100 samples of tear drops to give us a fascinating, insightful look at teardrops, in a series of work titled ‘The Topography of Tears’.
This is how it all began: on a day where Fisher was undergoing a period of change and loss in her own life, she caught one of her own tears and began to wonder if all the tears are the same.
She took a closer look of them under a microscope, and discovered that every single teardrop is different—from tears of joy, elation, to tears of anguish and grief, or tears that arise from yawning or cutting onions.
Her work is probably not scientifically accurate, as scientists could argue that the crystallization of salt is differs in different situations. However, Fisher’s body of work is still remarkable in helping us understand that even our every tear is encoded with a secret language.
Fisher explains, “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 release us to the possibility of realignment, reunion, catharsis: shedding tears, shedding old skin. It’s as though each one of our tears carries a microcosm of the collective human experience, like one drop of an ocean.”
For more images from this series, check out Fisher’s website.
Basal tears
Onion tears
Tears of change
Tears of ending and beginning
Tears of grief
Tears of timeless reunion
[via Visual News]