The 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 and 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 pass away, 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.
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 threads that seem to catch light like coiled wire in mercury bulbs.
The blue eyes drenched in 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.
My mother's eyes have accumulated decades of experience yet have somehow become more curious. The specks in her hazel irises seem to multiply each year, as if wonder itself is sedimentary. She gets giddy watching sunsets, looking for non-animals in cloud formations.
Each pair of eyes does the same thing: transforming light into stories, the same way my nephews turned pieces of trashed cardboard into rocketships to embark on lunar expeditions atop our blotchy and tattered living room carpet.
Macro photography of eyes reveals intricate landscapes. Irises aren’t colored discs, they're topographical maps with valleys and ridges and patterns as unique as fingerprints.
What moves me the 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 and see themselves in photographs but they'll never experience their own gaze from the outside. 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 often a moment of startled recognition followed by some kind of wonder at the strangeness of being housed inside a body.
Every eye tells me that there are as many worlds as there are ways of seeing. In our age of division and misunderstanding, we need to remember 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 monsters - 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.