Cuban-American actress Ana De Armas shows off her freckles in Puerto Rico early September 2025. (Photo by ana_d_armas/Instagram)

People jump into a swimming pool seeking relief from the summer heat, in Sanaa, Yemen on August 7, 2025. (Photo by Khaled Abdullah/Reuters)

A dog attends the Annual Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade in New York City, U.S., October 19, 2025. (Photo by Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)

Kelsea Ballerini performs at the 59th Annual Country Music Association Awards in Nashville, Tennessee, U.S., November 19, 2025. (Photo by Seth Herald/Reuters)

American model and socialite Hailey Bieber shows off her figure while rolling around in the sand on November 20, 2025. (Photo by haileybieber/Instagram)

Youths play football in a flooded field following rain in Jantho, Aceh province on November 24, 2025. (Photo by Chaideer Mahyuddin/AFP Photo)

A man walks through floodwater as rain pours in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on November 24, 2025. (Photo by Hasnoor Hussain/Reuters)

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.