The Topography of Tears
"When you first view Rose-Lynn Fisher's photographs, you might think you're looking down at the world from an airplane, at dunes, skyscrapers or shorelines. In fact, you're looking at her tears. . . . [There's] poetry in the idea that our emotional terrain bears visual resemblance to the physical world; that our tears can look like the vistas we see out an airplane window. Fisher's images are the only remaining trace of these places, which exist during a moment of intense feeling--and then vanish." --NPR
"[A] delicate, intimate book. . . . In The Topography of Tears photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher shows us a place where language strains to express grief, longing, pride, frustration, joy, the confrontation with something beautiful, the confrontation with an onion." --Boston Globe
Does a tear shed while chopping onions look different from a tear of happiness? In this powerful collection of images, an award-winning photographer trains her optical microscope and camera on her own tears and those of men, women, and children, released in moments of grief, pain, gratitude, and joy, and captured upon glass slides. These duotone photographs reveal the beauty of recurring patterns in nature and present evocative, crystalline imagery for contemplation. Underscored by poetic captions, they translate the mysterious act of crying into an atlas mapping the structure and magnificence of our interior lives.
Rose-Lynn Fisher is an artist and author of the International Photography Award-winning studies Bee and The Topography of Tears. Her photographs are exhibited in galleries, festivals, and museums across the world and have been featured by the Dr. Oz Show, NPR, Smithsonian, Harper's, New Yorker, Time, Wired, Reader's Digest, Discover, Brain Pickings, and elsewhere. She received her BFA from Otis Art Institute and lives in Los Angeles.
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Amateur Photographer magazine "Best Book of the Year" selection
Elizabeth Avedon's "Best Photography Book of the Year" selection
"When you first view Rose-Lynn Fisher's photographs, you might think you're looking down at the world from an airplane, at dunes, skyscrapers or shorelines. In fact, you're looking at her tears. . . . [There's] poetry in the idea that our emotional terrain bears visual resemblance to the physical world; that our tears can look like the vistas we see out an airplane window. Fisher's images are the only remaining trace of these places, which exist during a moment of intense feeling--and then vanish." --NPR
"[A] delicate, intimate book. . . . In The Topography of Tears photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher shows us a place where language strains to express grief, longing, pride, frustration, joy, the confrontation with something beautiful, the confrontation with an onion." --Boston Globe
"Enthralling. . . . Fisher uses the technological tools of science to probe the poetic, immaterial dimensions of a universal human behavior radiating infinite emotional hues." --Brain Pickings
"Incredible. . . . Lingers long in the mind." --Amateur Photographer magazine
"The sheer strangeness, variety and beauty of [Fisher's] 'photomicrographs' are stunning. . . . The photos also manage to convey a beautifully wide spectrum of human emotion." --Angelus magazine
"In seeing . . . The Topography of Tears, I am floored by our physical connectedness of the natural world. . . . The photographs in this series are delicate, fragile and quietly complex, not unlike the emotions that come with tears." --Lenscratch
"There are elements of Fisher's images [in The Topography of Tears] that can't be explained by science, and the great poet Ann Lauterbach also wrote an essay for the book, drawing on work from William Blake and Janis Joplin to define the many meanings of tears. It's only in the afterword that Fisher reveals the personal inspiration behind the work. . . . In those final pages of text, we're surprised to remember the ordinariness of the many epic 'landscapes' that came before. Suddenly, they don't seem so alien anymore." --Feature Shoot
"Addresses a studious urge to understand more closely the liquid expression of human emotion." --GUP Magazine
"A fascinating world in miniature. . . . An excellent study in self-examination through art." --PhotoBook Journal
"Looking at [Fisher's] photographs feels like staring out a plane window at the passing landscape below." --Studio 360
"A moving depiction of the micro and macro aspects of our emotional lives, and a beautiful means of integrating the often separate realms of science and art." --Refinery29
"An extraordinary take on an otherwise mundane human response." --Medical Daily
"Beautiful." --Good Men Project
"Stunning photographs transport us to a previously unseen world. . . . [They] also invoke within us a new set of emotions as individual as each of its viewers. What a pleasure." --William H. Frey II, PhD, founder and senior research director of HealthPartners Neurosciences and coauthor of Crying: The Mystery of Tears
"Reveals the existence of a multitude of territories inside of us." --Palais de Tokyo curator Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel
