Do tears of joy look the same as ones of woe—or ones from chopping onions? In “The Topography of Tears,” the Los Angeles-based photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher explores the physical terrain of one hundred tears emitted during a range of emotional states and physical reactions. Using a Zeiss microscope with an attached digital camera, she captures the composition of tears enclosed in glass slides, magnified between 10x and 40x. “There are many factors that determine the look of each tear image, including the viscosity of the tear, the chemistry of the weeper, the settings of the microscope, and the way I process the images afterwards,” she says.

A girl gets her hands decorated with traditional henna patterns at a roadside stall ahead of Eid-al Fitr to mark the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan in Karachi, Pakistan, July 17, 2015. (Photo by Akhtar Soomro/Reuters)

An Afghan girl makes a pile of unbaked bricks near the road passing through the Shamali Plains, about 10 kilometers (6 miles), west of Bagram, Afghanistan, Wednesay April 9, 2003. Children assist parents in their job to supplement family income. (Photo by Gurinder Osan/AP Photo)

A member of the Palace staff arranges Queen Victoria's Stuart Ball costume which is part of an exhibition to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Queen Victoria (1819–1901) this year at Buckingham Palace in London, Tuesday, April 2, 2019. The exhibition, Queen Victoria's Palace at the Summer Opening of Buckingham Palace from 20 July – 29 September 2019, will tell the story of her 62-year reign and her life at Buckingham Palace, which began when she ascended to the throne in June 1837. (Photo by Frank Augstein/AP Photo)

A child gets his head shaved by a Buddhist monk during a ceremony to prepare children to live as Buddhist monks for three weeks at Jogyesa Temple on May 09, 2023 in Seoul, South Korea. As part of the celebration of Buddha's birthday, young children are annually invited to become Buddhist monks for a three-week period. (Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)

Daughter being told off by her mother. (Photo by Peter Dazeley/Getty Images)

Fareeda, wife of Shameem Ahmad Ganai, who according to Fareeda was arrested during a clampdown a day before the scrapping of the special constitutional status in Kashmir by the government, tends to her husband's sheep in their house, in Pulwama, south of Srinagar, August 13, 2019. (Photo by Danish Siddiqui/Reuters)

The clown is on tour at Outlets on June 7, 2020 in Wuhan,Hubei Province,China.Wuhan has seen its urban life gradually get back to normal following encouragement from local city management to open up street-stalls. Since January, China has recorded more than 81,000 cases of COVID-19 and at least 3200 deaths, mostly in and around the city of Wuhan, in central Hubei province, where the outbreak first started. (Photo by Getty Images/Stringer)