Vue - biological lense

They say the eyes are windows to the soul, but I think they're something even more extraordinary – they are each a unique camera that has never existed before and will never exist again. Every iris is a one-of-a-kind aperture, every pupil dilates to let in light that will be processed by a mind unlike any other in history.

When you photograph eyes in macro detail, you are not just capturing anatomy. You are documenting the very instruments through which entire universes of experiences are filtered. These are the lenses that have watched sunrises that moved someone to tears, that have seen loved ones' faces light up with joy, that have witnessed moments of heartbreak no one else will ever know.

That brown eye flecked with gold? It belongs to someone who sees spring differently than you do. Those long lashes have blinked away tears of anguish and detriment you have no idea about. That particular shade of green in my mother’s eyes has reflected trees and skies from a childhood spent in places most could not imagine today.

Inherited Wonder

There's something about the way children encounter the world that adults spend decades trying to remember. They haven't yet learned to dismiss the ordinary as unworthy of attention. A puddle becomes an ocean, shadows on walls transform into dancing creatures, and the sound of wind through leaves carries conversations from invisible friends.

My best friend’s chestnut tinted eyes reveal someone who collects moments most people discard - the precise way a pigeon lifts her foot as it struts along a paved road, or how the multicoloured bead-curtain on her neighbour’s window reminds her of pastel candy necklaces. Her irises hold copper threads that seem to catch light like coiled wire in mercury bulbs.

The blue eyes that carry a certain melancholy see beauty in places others find unsettling. They're drawn to the shadows between streetlights, the way faces distort in subway car windows, how music venues look empty after everyone has gone home. There's something about sadness that sharpens vision - these eyes catch the loneliness in Edward Hopper’s  ‘The Scream’ and find kinship in the rawness of live concerts where strangers scream lyrics together in the dark.

My mother's eyes carry the strangest gift: they've accumulated decades of experience yet somehow gotten more curious, not less. The golden flecks in her hazel irises seem to multiply each year, as if wonder itself is sedimentary, building up in layers. She still giggles at sunsets like she's seeing her first one, still finds faces in cloud formations with the dedication of a professional astronomer.

Each pair does the same impossible work: transforming light into stories – the same way children turn pieces of trashed cardboard into rocketships to embark on lunar expeditions atop blotchy and tattered living room carpets.

The Archaeology of Attention

Every macro shot reveals landscapes I never expected. Irises aren't just colored circles - they're topographical maps with valleys and ridges, patterns as unique as fingerprints. Some look like abstract paintings, others like aerial views of river deltas or dried earth.

But it's the stories I imagine that captivate me most. These eyes have been the first things lovers saw in the morning. They've watched children take first steps, witnessed final breaths, seen sunsets from hospital windows and city skylines from airplane seats. They've cried over books, sparkled with inside jokes, rolled with teenage exasperation.

Each eye is an archive of moments - not just what was seen, but how it was seen. The same sunset looks different through eyes clouded in grief versus eyes bright with new love. Reality isn't just about what's out there; it's about the consciousness encountering it.

What moves me most is realizing that these eyes will never see themselves the way I see them through my lens. They can glimpse their reflection in mirrors, see themselves in photographs, but they'll never experience their own gaze from the outside. They'll never see how their pupils contract in bright light, how their expression shifts when they're lost in thought.

We spend our entire lives looking out through these windows, but we can never truly see the windows themselves. It's the ultimate blind spot - we use our eyes to see everything except our own seeing.

When I show people macro photographs of their own eyes, there's always a moment of startled recognition followed by something deeper - a kind of wonder at the strangeness of being housed inside a body, of experiencing the world through this peculiar biological camera they've never fully examined.

But here's where it gets wonderfully strange: show the same photograph to different people and watch their eyes while they look at eyes. Ginny sees storm clouds brewing in brown irises. Leo finds tiny galaxies spinning in green ones. Aura insists they can see unicorns galloping through the golden flecks, and honestly, once they point it out, I can't unsee them either.

My friend Elo – the one enamoured by the way pigeons wobble their heads as they pace - she looks at hazel eyes and sees forests where each color change marks a different season, where deer made of light particles leap between amber and green.

The retired art teacher sees abstract expressionist paintings. The mechanic sees engine parts - "Look, you can see the pistons firing in those radiating lines?" The poet sees entire stanzas written in the curve of each eyelash shadow.

And the children - oh, the children see everything we've forgotten how to notice. They find dinosaurs sleeping in the dark centers, claim the blotches of light brown in their mother’s eyes resemble the baked cookies from the night before and insist that heterochromia means someone has been borrowing colors from other people's dreams.

Seeing the Seers

Vue began as my attempt to document the instruments of perception themselves. But it's become something more - a reflection on the radical subjectivity of experience, a celebration of the fact that consciousness creates as much as it observes.

Every eye tells me that there are as many worlds as there are ways of seeing. That child seeing boats in puddles and cookies in corneas, that friend discovering beauty in places others call ugly while insisting storm clouds live in stranger's eyes - they're all right. They're all seeing truly, just differently.

In our age of division and misunderstanding, maybe we need reminders that we're all just doing our best to make sense of reality through our own unique apertures. The same light hits all our retinas, but the stories we create from it - unicorns and storm clouds and sleeping dinosaurs - those are entirely our own.

The next time someone sees the world differently than you do, remember: they're not wrong. They're just looking through a different camera, one shaped by experiences you'll never have, calibrated by a consciousness you'll never fully understand.

And that's not an error in the system of being human - it's the most beautiful feature of it all!

Blog Post Title Two

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Blog Post Title Three

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Blog Post Title Four

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.