"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.
