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Autism through talent
Photography and Empathy: What Happens in the Human Brain
Written by EVOAUTISM Foundation
Visitor at 100 First Women Portraits by Anita Corbin, Brighton Museum & Art Gallery
A photograph gives very little information on its own. We see a face, a body, a room, sometimes an object or another person, and within seconds we start forming an impression - where someone is looking, how they're standing, what surrounds them. We might wonder what happened just before the shutter clicked, or what the person was feeling at that moment.
Photography and empathy come up together often in conversations about documentary images, portraiture and social photography. The connection between photography and empathy is less automatic than it looks.
A photograph can hold our attention and stir an emotional response. It can also hint at another person's life. Whether those hints turn into empathy depends on the photograph itself, the context around it, and the person looking at it.
Research in neuroscience, psychology and visual communication offers some answers about what actually happens during that process.
Photography and empathy come up together often in conversations about documentary images, portraiture and social photography. The connection between photography and empathy is less automatic than it looks.
A photograph can hold our attention and stir an emotional response. It can also hint at another person's life. Whether those hints turn into empathy depends on the photograph itself, the context around it, and the person looking at it.
Research in neuroscience, psychology and visual communication offers some answers about what actually happens during that process.
How does the brain respond to photographs?
There's no single "empathy switch" that turns on whenever we look at another person.
Researchers describe several distinct processes that can happen when we respond to someone else. One involves sharing part of that person's emotional state. Another involves reasoning about what they might be thinking or feeling - what psychologists call Theory of Mind. Compassion and the urge to help are related, but they aren't the same thing as empathy.
Researchers describe several distinct processes that can happen when we respond to someone else. One involves sharing part of that person's emotional state. Another involves reasoning about what they might be thinking or feeling - what psychologists call Theory of Mind. Compassion and the urge to help are related, but they aren't the same thing as empathy.
A large neuroimaging meta-analysis led by Matthias Schurz looked at empathy and Theory of Mind together and found both overlapping brain regions and areas that stayed distinct. [1] A 2025 quantitative review reached a similar conclusion: social interaction recruits cognitive and affective brain systems at the same time, but the direct overlap between the activation patterns tied to different social processes seems limited. [2]
That makes it hard to defend simple claims like "photography activates empathy in the brain." When someone looks at a portrait, several things might happen at once - recognizing an expression, remembering something similar from their own life, making assumptions about the person, or trying to work out what's going on. Those responses can lead in very different directions.
Visitors engaging with portrait displays at the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool.
Why looking at a photograph is an active process
Seeing an image involves more than registering what's in front of us. The brain processes faces, objects and spatial relationships while also drawing on memory and past experience to decide what an image might mean.
A 2025 study in Scientific Reports tracked eye movements and brain activity while participants viewed artistic photographs, some of them visually ambiguous and open to more than one reading. People made more eye fixations when asked to evaluate the photographs than when they simply looked at them, and the ambiguous images produced stronger activity in the brain regions tied to visual processing and attention. [3]
The study wasn't testing empathy - it was about photographic aesthetics and ambiguity. But it points to something relevant here: looking at a photograph can be an active search. A detail catches your eye, then your eyes move elsewhere, then new information shifts your first read of the image. Even a still photograph can involve a sequence of small perceptual decisions, which is one reason two people can look at the same portrait and notice completely different things.
A 2025 study in Scientific Reports tracked eye movements and brain activity while participants viewed artistic photographs, some of them visually ambiguous and open to more than one reading. People made more eye fixations when asked to evaluate the photographs than when they simply looked at them, and the ambiguous images produced stronger activity in the brain regions tied to visual processing and attention. [3]
The study wasn't testing empathy - it was about photographic aesthetics and ambiguity. But it points to something relevant here: looking at a photograph can be an active search. A detail catches your eye, then your eyes move elsewhere, then new information shifts your first read of the image. Even a still photograph can involve a sequence of small perceptual decisions, which is one reason two people can look at the same portrait and notice completely different things.
How context changes the emotions we see in a face
Faces seem to give us direct access to emotion, but research suggests the process depends heavily on context.
A 2025 review of studies on facial emotion and visual context found that body posture and the surrounding scene can change how viewers label the emotion on a face - and that faces, in turn, affect how people read the scene around them. [4]
Earlier work on first impressions found that photographs of the same person could produce different judgments of traits like trustworthiness depending on their expression and the camera angle. In some cases, the difference between two photographs of one person was larger than the difference between two different people. [5]
The face hasn't changed identity. The evidence available to the viewer has.
Photography controls a lot of that evidence. A portrait against an empty wall gives one impression. The same person photographed in the studio where they work, at a piano, next to a collection they've spent years building, or with someone close to them gives a different one. No single photograph contains an entire life - but what appears inside the frame affects how we first read the person in it.
A 2025 review of studies on facial emotion and visual context found that body posture and the surrounding scene can change how viewers label the emotion on a face - and that faces, in turn, affect how people read the scene around them. [4]
Earlier work on first impressions found that photographs of the same person could produce different judgments of traits like trustworthiness depending on their expression and the camera angle. In some cases, the difference between two photographs of one person was larger than the difference between two different people. [5]
The face hasn't changed identity. The evidence available to the viewer has.
Photography controls a lot of that evidence. A portrait against an empty wall gives one impression. The same person photographed in the studio where they work, at a piano, next to a collection they've spent years building, or with someone close to them gives a different one. No single photograph contains an entire life - but what appears inside the frame affects how we first read the person in it.
Hannah Price’s City of Brotherly Love in Close Enough: New Perspectives from 12 Women Photographers of Magnum, International Center of Photography, New York.
Can photography increase empathy?
There's no simple yes-or-no answer.
Photographs can make an individual feel more immediate, more real to the viewer. Research on what's called the identifiable victim effect is one example. In a 2013 study, people responded differently to charitable appeals depending on whether they included photographs of individual children or just silhouettes. The photographs increased giving, and researchers found activity in brain regions tied to affect and valuation that predicted how much people donated. [6]
Photographs can make an individual feel more immediate, more real to the viewer. Research on what's called the identifiable victim effect is one example. In a 2013 study, people responded differently to charitable appeals depending on whether they included photographs of individual children or just silhouettes. The photographs increased giving, and researchers found activity in brain regions tied to affect and valuation that predicted how much people donated. [6]
That tells us visual identification can move emotional and behavioral responses. It doesn't tell us viewers understood the photographed person accurately - and that distinction matters. Feeling sad for someone, understanding their situation, and treating them differently afterward are three separate outcomes. A photograph might affect one without touching the other two.
A small study in a hospital setting shows what can shift when a photograph adds personal context instead of emotional intensity. Researchers invited nineteen patients to choose personal photographs - family pictures, hobbies, memories, keepsakes - to keep near their beds, then asked forty clinicians about the experience. The photographs gave staff an easy opening for conversation, and interviews with both groups touched on connection and on seeing the patient as a person with a life outside the hospital room. [7] It's a small, qualitative study, so it can't prove personal photographs reliably build empathy in every hospital. But it shows what happens when new information enters the room: the patient hasn't changed, the observer just has more to go on.
A small study in a hospital setting shows what can shift when a photograph adds personal context instead of emotional intensity. Researchers invited nineteen patients to choose personal photographs - family pictures, hobbies, memories, keepsakes - to keep near their beds, then asked forty clinicians about the experience. The photographs gave staff an easy opening for conversation, and interviews with both groups touched on connection and on seeing the patient as a person with a life outside the hospital room. [7] It's a small, qualitative study, so it can't prove personal photographs reliably build empathy in every hospital. But it shows what happens when new information enters the room: the patient hasn't changed, the observer just has more to go on.
Installation view of Unlimited Youth by Susana Girón, featuring Masters athlete Dorothy McLennan.
So the more useful question isn't "do images make people care?" It's what kind of response an image produces, what information caused it, and whether that response holds up once the photograph is out of view.
Photography used in awareness campaigns has often leaned on visible distress - the assumption being that stronger suffering should produce stronger concern. Research doesn't consistently back that up.
Jennifer Midberry and colleagues tested photographs used alongside journalism about homelessness and addiction. Readers saw stories with no photograph, images focused only on the problem, images focused on a response to the problem, or a mix of both. The problem-only photographs produced the lowest levels of compassion. Stories that paired the difficulty with a response to it produced more hope, compassion and empathy. [8]
That's worth remembering for anyone working with disability, illness or social exclusion. An image can be emotionally intense while telling the viewer almost nothing about the person in it. Repeated photographs of distress can also narrow someone's identity down to just the difficulty - work, relationships, humor and competence disappear from the frame because the hardship fills the whole picture. The viewer gets a strong emotional cue and very little else to go on, which is a poor basis for actually understanding someone.
Jennifer Midberry and colleagues tested photographs used alongside journalism about homelessness and addiction. Readers saw stories with no photograph, images focused only on the problem, images focused on a response to the problem, or a mix of both. The problem-only photographs produced the lowest levels of compassion. Stories that paired the difficulty with a response to it produced more hope, compassion and empathy. [8]
That's worth remembering for anyone working with disability, illness or social exclusion. An image can be emotionally intense while telling the viewer almost nothing about the person in it. Repeated photographs of distress can also narrow someone's identity down to just the difficulty - work, relationships, humor and competence disappear from the frame because the hardship fills the whole picture. The viewer gets a strong emotional cue and very little else to go on, which is a poor basis for actually understanding someone.
Why images of suffering do not always create compassion
The interest or ability at the center of a story isn't treated as proof of exceptional worth. It's one way into a fuller account of who someone is - what has been difficult, what helped, and what's still difficult today. For younger visitors, seeing autistic adults with a range of interests, strengths and support needs introduces examples of development that rarely show up in everyday public imagery. This doesn't predict that any child will have the same future. It gives the child, their family and their teachers another reference point for thinking about how an interest might develop with the right support.
Conceptual exhibition view of Autism Through Talent, EVOAUTISM Foundation.
Photography, empathy and autism representation
A photograph can show appearance, environment, gesture and visible relationships. It can't show years of practice, how someone made sense of an event, or why they chose a particular career.
Language fills some of that gap. A 2024 meta-analysis on reading fiction found a small positive relationship between narrative experience and outcomes tied to empathy and Theory of Mind, though the size of the effect varies across studies. [9] For photography, that suggests a useful division of labor: the image gives visual access to a person, and a first-person account gives access to intention, memory and experience. Together they give a viewer more to work with than either one alone.
The relationship between photography and empathy carries particular weight when photography is used to represent autism. Many characteristics of autistic experience don't read reliably from a face. A portrait can't show how someone communicates across different settings, how an interest developed over ten years, or why a behavior that looked unusual to one observer made complete sense to the person doing it.
Context does that work instead. A photograph of an autistic child might capture a few seconds from one period of their life. A later portrait might show the same person working, performing, designing or researching - pursuing an interest that's become central to their adult life. Neither photograph explains the years between those two moments. The story does.
That's part of why Autism Through Talent, the public exhibition developed by EVOAUTISM Foundation, pairs photography with first-person storytelling. Each portrait and story is built with the participant, not about them - they decide what to share and review the material before it becomes public.
Language fills some of that gap. A 2024 meta-analysis on reading fiction found a small positive relationship between narrative experience and outcomes tied to empathy and Theory of Mind, though the size of the effect varies across studies. [9] For photography, that suggests a useful division of labor: the image gives visual access to a person, and a first-person account gives access to intention, memory and experience. Together they give a viewer more to work with than either one alone.
The relationship between photography and empathy carries particular weight when photography is used to represent autism. Many characteristics of autistic experience don't read reliably from a face. A portrait can't show how someone communicates across different settings, how an interest developed over ten years, or why a behavior that looked unusual to one observer made complete sense to the person doing it.
Context does that work instead. A photograph of an autistic child might capture a few seconds from one period of their life. A later portrait might show the same person working, performing, designing or researching - pursuing an interest that's become central to their adult life. Neither photograph explains the years between those two moments. The story does.
That's part of why Autism Through Talent, the public exhibition developed by EVOAUTISM Foundation, pairs photography with first-person storytelling. Each portrait and story is built with the participant, not about them - they decide what to share and review the material before it becomes public.
What photography can - and cannot - do
Photography doesn't give us direct access to another person's mind. It gives us selected information, and that selection matters because human perception moves fast - we form impressions from expressions, posture, camera angle and surrounding context within seconds.
The photographer makes choices about what a viewer is able to notice. A curator makes another set of choices about which image goes on a wall, what text sits beside it, and what hangs nearby. Those decisions carry weight when the subject is autism. If autistic people mostly appear in images tied to childhood difficulty, therapy or isolation, that gives the public a narrow sample of autistic life. Portraits made in workplaces, studios, homes or universities add information that the familiar visual vocabulary usually leaves out. The diagnosis hasn't changed - the available picture of the person's life has.
Current research on photography and empathy supports several smaller claims rather than one large one. Photographs can direct attention. They affect emotional response and social judgment. Context changes what viewers think they see in a face. Identifiable images can affect behavior in some settings, and personal photographs can give an observer information that changes how they approach someone else. None of that guarantees empathy on its own - but it does suggest that the visual information available to us affects how we begin to understand another person.
For photographers and curators, that leaves one practical question: what does this image let the viewer notice about the person in front of them? A photograph can't answer every question about life. It can give the viewer a reason to ask another one.
The photographer makes choices about what a viewer is able to notice. A curator makes another set of choices about which image goes on a wall, what text sits beside it, and what hangs nearby. Those decisions carry weight when the subject is autism. If autistic people mostly appear in images tied to childhood difficulty, therapy or isolation, that gives the public a narrow sample of autistic life. Portraits made in workplaces, studios, homes or universities add information that the familiar visual vocabulary usually leaves out. The diagnosis hasn't changed - the available picture of the person's life has.
Current research on photography and empathy supports several smaller claims rather than one large one. Photographs can direct attention. They affect emotional response and social judgment. Context changes what viewers think they see in a face. Identifiable images can affect behavior in some settings, and personal photographs can give an observer information that changes how they approach someone else. None of that guarantees empathy on its own - but it does suggest that the visual information available to us affects how we begin to understand another person.
For photographers and curators, that leaves one practical question: what does this image let the viewer notice about the person in front of them? A photograph can't answer every question about life. It can give the viewer a reason to ask another one.
