A one-horned rhinoceros crosses a road inside Kaziranga national park on the eve of the World Rhino Day in Gauhati, India, Tuesday, September 21, 2021. Kaziranga is home to nearly 2,500 one-horned rhinos and is the world’s largest habitat for the rare animal. (Photo by Anupam Nath/AP Photo)
A woman looks at The Empire State Building and the New York Skyline during a preview of SUMMIT One Vanderbilt observation deck, which is spread across the top four floors of the new One Vanderbilt tower in Midtown Manhattan, in New York City, New York, U.S., October 18, 2021. (Photo by Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)
A woman places her fingers into the crucifix-shaped holes in one of the ancient columns in the Church of the Nativity on December 22, 2011 in Bethlehem, West Bank. (Photo by Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)
The lead singer of one band talks to two bemused kids at a gig at the “Warzone Centre” in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1980s. (Photo by Ricky Adam/Mediadrumworld)
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.