06/28/2018
Below is an evocative quote from Rose-Lynn Fisher’s series of photomicrographs (pictures of tears under a microscope). The photo is captioned “Grief and Gratitude.” What do you see?
“The random compositions I find in magnified tears often evoke a sense of place, like aerial views of emotional terrain. Though the empirical nature of tears is a composition of water, proteins, minerals, hormones, and enzymes, the topography of tears is a momentary landscape, transient as the fingerprint of someone in a dream. The accumulation of these images is like an ephemeral atlas.
Roaming microscopic vistas, I am struck by the visual similarities between the vast and tiny worlds within worlds of life all around us, and inside of us. The patterning of nature seems so consistent, regardless of scale. Patterns of erosion etched into the earth over millions of years can resemble the branched or crystalline forms in an evaporated tear that took less than a minute to form.
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. Tears spontaneously release us to the possibility of realignment, reunion, catharsis, intractable resistance short-circuited. 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.”
Rose-Lynn Fisher, author/photographer of “The Topography of Tears”
