Why Neuroscience Needs Photography

Concrete Human is a photography exhibition I co-founded. It shows the influence buildings have on people. The exhibition is a globally unique curation of neuroscience, architecture and photography. I want to share my perspective on why these fields belong together and why they need each other.

In the summer of 2025 I visited a photography exhibition in Munich. The theme was civilization, how we live today, and it was beautifully curated. But when I left the exhibition, not much had stuck beyond memories of individual photographs. The theme was so big, but the overall impression had somehow made it smaller. I had seen beautiful images and moved on. I could remember beautiful pictures but not the reason for them.

On the way home I asked myself why. And the answer was not complicated. The individual images were beautifully curated, but not by context. That context was not recognizable to me and so it made nothing visible. Even though the images were genuinely worth seeing. Art without cause. Nothing to criticize, but I had expected something more that I could take home with me.

What data cannot do

There are many studies on how buildings and architecture affect people. Ceiling height influences how we think and the amount and intensity of daylight in the office determines how we sleep at night. Noise raises cortisol levels and greenery reduces crime. The research is very clear in many respects.

It can be found in academic journals. But they are only read by academics, because the findings are buried in tables and the values and results are not part of a mayor’s daily business, nor does any investor in large real estate projects want to interpret them. Of course architects know that light matters, but they do not use quantified findings to their full extent. Urban planners know very well that density is a problem, but the topic is not explored in any depth at city council meetings. I have sat in those meetings myself and did not give it much thought at the time either.

The knowledge is not missing, but it remains invisible to most people. That is nobody’s fault but it is something that must change if we take people seriously.

The limits of diagrams

One could say, then make infographics, great presentations that translate the findings for non-experts.

Which would work on certain levels. They would certainly create an aha moment and the viewer would understand more, but it would remain just another one of a thousand pieces of information that day and by the next morning most of it would be forgotten. A diagram, a chart, a colorful presentation informs. But what it does not do: move you.

The urgency that follows from knowledge about the built environment is not an intellectual insight. You simply have to feel what a bad space does to a person before you are able to change it. Feelings do not come from lines and bars, no matter how well they are designed.

Why photography is the ideal medium

The image of a man staring at his phone in a windowless concrete canyon says more than the study proving that lack of visual connection to nature raises blood pressure. Not because the image is more precise, but because once it has become a feeling, it stays with you long term. But it is not just about the single image.

It is also about the curation. If photography manages to make data tangible, feelable, because the images touch you emotionally, then that must not be lost again through isolation but must be held together by the context, the curation. Because what touches you stays with you and changes behavior.

When you identify a space that demonstrably makes people sick and can actually recognize the person and the suffering inside it, you understand the urgency. No research paper can achieve that. And for those who will never understand databases and architectural planning but are affected nonetheless, photography creates access that otherwise does not exist. Residents, citizens, patients, children and the decision-makers and planners responsible, they can all read an image.

The numbers behind it

A Harvard study showed that better indoor air quality can increase cognitive performance by 101 percent. Not by a few percent. By double. The cost of this improvement is between 14 and 40 dollars per person per year. But the estimated productivity gain is 6,500 dollars per person per year.

Consider that 90 percent of an average company’s operating costs are people. Only 10 percent are rent and energy. A one percent improvement in the work environment yields more than the entire energy savings of an ecologically optimized building.

Wrong lighting at work costs about 45 minutes of sleep per night. Per employee. Buildings that make people sick cost 150 billion dollars per year in the US alone. In Europe 200 billion euros are lost annually to absenteeism.

The numbers are all there. But as long as they stay in tables, nothing changes. Because nobody reads them, let alone understands them.

The important difference

Ecological building keeps getting more expensive and energy costs are rising at the same time. It requires better materials, elaborate insulation systems, solar technology, heat recovery. The additional costs are 7 to 9 percent. That is technology. And it costs a lot of money.

Building that puts people at the center and increases their productivity, let us call it human-centered building, costs almost nothing extra. I do not like that sentence either but it is much truer than we want to admit, because it requires effort. The effort of engaging with data. Because ceiling heights, window placements, acoustic zoning, materials and so on are all part of design decisions. It is about composition, proportion, light, air, site. It is about everything.

But the fundamental decisions must be made much earlier. Long before the architect, it must be clear who you are actually building for. It is about the difference between a building that makes people sick and one that keeps them healthy. That is not a design or cost question. It is a knowledge difference. And that knowledge must become visible to everyone.

The exhibition as analysis

A city can be documented photographically so that it becomes visible from a new perspective. Not as a coffee table book or tourism marketing, but as analysis. Every image follows a dataset. The foundation is an ontological system that structures the knowledge from thousands of studies and provides the scientific explanation for every documented situation: why a square feels oppressive, why a street amplifies stress, and why the park in between still does not calm you down.

People who visit this exhibition understand their own city better. Politicians receive a tool that improves their decision-making. And planners gain a better understanding of their responsibility. Nothing stays hidden in a drawer but becomes publicly visible.

The first message for every visitor could be: here you understand the reasons why you feel the way you feel. And also how things can be better and what needs to be done for that.

Summary

Thousands of research findings explain very precisely why spaces heal or make people sick. In between is an infinitely large gray zone. The knowledge behind it has had little impact so far because nobody reads it and only few understand it.

Photography helps to emphasize the urgency. Not as decoration, but as a tool to turn what sits in databases into something you can feel, understand and remember.

One needs the other. And without photography the research stays in the database. Without research the photography remains a wall image without a message. Together they create something that can change cities. For people.