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, 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.
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 Munch'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, still finds non-animals in cloud formations with the dedication of a professional zoologist.
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.
Every macro shot reveals intricate landscapes. Irises aren't just colored circles - they're topographical maps with valleys and ridges, patterns as unique as fingerprints. Some look like abstract paintings while others resemble aerial views of river deltas or dried earth.
But it's the stories behind each individual lense that fascinate 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 and rolled with teenage vexations. 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.
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. They'll never see how their pupils contract in bright light or 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, some kind of wonder at the strangeness of being housed inside a body, of experiencing the world through this peculiar biological camera.
Now show the same photograph to different people and watch their eyes while they look at eyes. My mother sees storm clouds brewing in brown irises. My coworker insists they can see unicorns galloping through golden flecks and 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, a green ocean where deer made of light particles leap between shades of amber and green.
Every eye tells me that there are as many worlds as there are ways of seeing. The child seeing monsters in pupils and cookies in corneas, my friend discovering beauty in places others call ugly - they're all right. They're all seeing truly, just differently.
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.