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 wasn’t complicated. The individual images were beautifully curated, but not according to context. The context was not recognisable to me and therefore made nothing visible. Even though the pictures on their own were really worth seeing. So: art without occasion. Nothing to criticise, but I had expected something more to take home.

What Data Can’t 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, and greenery reduces crime. The research in many respects is very clear.

It’s in the specialist journals. But only academics read them, because the findings sit in tables and deal with values and results that don’t belong to the day-to-day business of a mayor, and that no investor in large real estate projects wants to interpret either. Of course architects know that light is important, but they don’t use quantified findings to their full extent. Urban planners know very well that density is a problem, but the topic is not dealt with in any depth in local council meetings. I’ve been in those meetings myself and didn’t think about it in the moment either.

The knowledge isn’t missing, but for most it stays invisible. That’s not a fault, but something that has to change if you take people seriously.

The Limits of Diagrams

One could say: then make infographics, great presentations, that translate the findings for supposed laypeople too.

Which would also work on certain levels. Because they certainly produce an aha effect and the viewer will understand more, but it will remain one of a thousand pieces of information that day, and by the next morning most of it is forgotten. A diagram, a chart and a colourful presentation inform. But what they don’t do: touch.

The need for action that follows from knowledge about the built environment is not an intellectual insight. You simply have to feel what a bad room does to a person before you are able to change anything about it. Feelings don’t arise from lines and bars, no matter how well designed.

Why Photography Is the Ideal Medium

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

It’s also about the curation. If photography manages to make data tangible and felt, because it touches emotionally, then that mustn’t be lost again through isolation. It has to be held together through context, through the curation. Because what touches, stays, and thereby changes behaviour.

When you identify a space that demonstrably makes people ill and at the same time actually recognise the person and the suffering in it, you understand the urgency. No study paper can do that. And for those who will never understand databases and architectural planning, but are still affected, photography creates an access that doesn’t otherwise exist. Residents, citizens, patients, children and the responsible decision makers and planners, they can all read an image.

The Numbers Behind It

A Harvard study showed that better indoor air can raise cognitive performance by 101 percent (Allen et al., 2016, Environmental Health Perspectives). So not by a few percent, but by double. The cost for 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 (MacNaughton et al., 2015, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health).

One has to remember that according to the industry’s rule of thumb often cited as “3-30-300” (JLL/World Green Building Council, 2014), 90 percent of a typical company’s operating costs are people. Only 10 percent are rent and energy. A one percent improvement of the work environment brings more than all the energy savings of an ecologically optimised building.

Wrong lighting at the workplace costs roughly three quarters of an hour of sleep per night. Per employee (Boubekri et al., 2014, Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine). The WHO calculated in 2015 that bad air in buildings costs Europe 1.6 trillion US dollars a year (WHO Europe, 2015). The British Building Research Establishment puts the NHS costs from bad buildings alone at 1.4 billion pounds per year (BRE, 2021).

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 is getting more expensive, and energy costs are rising at the same time. It needs better materials, complex insulation systems, solar technology, heat recovery. The additional costs are 7 to 9 percent for higher certification levels like LEED Gold or Platinum (Kats, 2010, Greening Our Built World). That’s technology. And it costs a lot of money.

Building that puts the person at the centre and raises their productivity, let’s call it human-centred building, costs almost nothing extra. I don’t like this sentence either, but it’s much truer than we like to admit, because it requires effort. To engage with data. Because ceiling heights, window placements, acoustic zoning, materials and so on are all part of the design decisions. It’s about composition, proportion, light, air, site. It’s about all sorts of things.

But the fundamental decisions have to be made much earlier. Long before the architect, it has to be clear: who am I actually building for? It’s about the difference between a building that makes people ill and one that keeps them healthy. That’s not a design question, not a cost question. It’s a knowledge difference. And this knowledge has to become visible to everyone.

The Exhibition as Analysis

A city can be photographed in a way that makes it visible from a new perspective. Not as a coffee table book or tourism advertising, but as analysis. Every image follows a data set. The basis is an ontological system that structures the knowledge from thousands of studies and for every documented situation provides the scientific explanation: why a plaza feels oppressive, a street amplifies stress and the park in between still doesn’t calm you down.

People who visit this exhibition understand their own city better. Politicians get a tool that improves their ability to decide. And planners get a better understanding of their responsibility. Nothing stays hidden in a drawer, it 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 it can be better and what it takes.

Summary

Thousands of research findings very precisely explain why spaces heal or make people ill. In between there is an infinitely large grey zone. The knowledge behind it has had hardly any effect, because nobody reads it and only few understand it.

Photography helps to emphasise the urgency. Not as decoration, but as a means of turning what sits in the databases into something that can be felt, understood and retained.

The one needs the other. Research without photography stays in the database. Photography without research is just decoration. Together, something emerges that can change cities.