If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then the London-based photographer known only as Rankin offers a spectacular view. His Eyescapes collection features close-ups of the irises of friends, relatives and clients. Each image is compelling, and reveals that what appears to be a uniform colour is really a kaleidoscope of hues, iridescent and intricately patterned.
And while Rankin explores the eye’s beautiful imagery, Simon Ings explains the science in his new book, The Eye: A Natural History. We find Rankin’s work so appealing, says Ings, because our eyes evolved to communicate emotion and meaning. If you want to know how a potential lover feels, say, gaze into their eyes: when someone is aroused, they blink more often and the pupils dilate.
The human eye works in mysterious ways. Ings reveals that we spend much of our waking hours “blind”. Our eyes move about three times per second, during which time the brain ignores all signals from the eye to save us from perpetual seasickness. This accounts for some 10 per cent of seeing time. The rest of the time we only focus on 1 per cent of what is all around us. Even then, we don’t get the whole picture. As you read this text, the constant movement of your eyes means they can only focus on between 20 and 70 per cent of the words.
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We’ve been grappling with the eye’s weirdness since birth. Ings explains that since it is not pitch-black in the womb, babies develop nocturnal vision. At birth they can barely see in daylight. What’s more, our eyes keep us out of touch with reality: there is a delay of about 500 milliseconds from the image registering on the retina to us being aware of it.
Eyescapes is at the Knokke-Heist International Photofestival in Belgium, from 1 April. The Eye: A Natural History is published this month by Bloomsbury.