You may jest that , when something sad brings a tear to your eye , someone is chop onions in the room . But if you compared those two character of bust under a microscope , would they wait standardized ?
Rose - Lynn Fisher ’s photographic project“Topography of Tears”captures the nonfigurative landscape contained within dried human snag . She begin the project during a geological period of personal turmoil , when she began to wonder about the form of her tears and whether her tears of grief were different from her crying of felicity . She began to dry and catalog her snag , shoot them under a stock light microscope . finally , she commence collecting the tears of others , pull in a series of 100 tear discipline . On her site , she explains the entreaty of the nonobjective position of the tears combined with knowledge of their chemistry :
The random composition I find in hyperbolize tears often evoke a horse sense of place , like aerial views of worked up terrain . Although the empirical nature of tears is a alchemy of water , proteins , minerals , hormone , antibodies and enzymes , the topography of tears is a momentary landscape , transient as the fingermark of someone in a dreaming . This series ls like an ephemeral atlas .
Above , you may see a crop of “ onion plant tears ” on the left and “ bout of grief ” on the right . you may see full - sized paradigm ather websiteand at theSmithsonian ’s Collage of Arts and Science blog . sure as shooting basal tears — like those that issue when chop onions — have a different chemical component than psychical tears — like teardrop of joy and grief . For model , the former contains enzymes like muramidase , which push bacteria , and the latter contains leucine enkephalin , a born painkiller . But there ’s a sure poetry to Fisher ’s comparing . There are n’t enough images up — and her physical process for drying and handle tears is n’t draw well enough — to make thorough optical comparisons between the eccentric of tears across human beings , but perhaps Fisher will eventually gather up them in a book . Last year , she releasedBee , a collection of her fascinating bee photographs of bees photographed under an electron microscope .
The Topography of Tears[Rose - Lynn Fisher]The Microscopic Structures of Dried Human Tears[Smithsonian viaNeatorama ]
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