Composition

I can’t remember the last time I cried. It is not that I think crying is a bad thing or a sign of weakness, I just haven’t cried in a long time. I am not sure why, since simply watching the news gives one ample reason to break down in tears. Humans spend much of their early years crying — it is our first and most primal means of communication. Infants cry when they are hungry, need to blow off some steam or need to be burped. As we get older, we produce tears for a variety of reasons.  Sometimes we tear up due to an allergy or some eye irritation, like cutting an onion. Sometimes we tear up simply to lubricate our eyes. We also tear up for a variety of emotional reasons, such as tears of joy, laughter or sadness. I am told we cry less as we get older and women statistically cry more than men. Tears and making our emotions visible is the subject matter of artist Rose-Lynn Fisher’s latest work.

Fisher developed a number of images by taking photographs of dried tears through a standard microscope. After examining hundreds of samples, she began to notice that the patterns resembled large-scale landscapes and started interpreting the images as aerial views of emotional terrains.  She curated a series of images in a book entitled The Topography of Tears. The image above was produced from tears of “hope.” Scientists have noted that emotional tears are chemically different than the kind of tears one produces from, say, cutting an onion. Emotional tears have more stress hormones and natural pain killers in them. To take it a step further, Fisher’s photographs suggest that different emotions form visible structural differences in tears. Although her work is not intended to provide scientific proof, the proposition is certainly intriguing and powerful. I may need to pull up a heart wrenching movie on Netflix and have a good cry.